Google embraces voice search

"The next big thing is definitely speech and voice recognition," Microsoft founder Bill Gates recently told the Daily Mail. Voice recognition is a key feature of Microsoft's popular interactive Kinect for Xbox 360.

In a June 14 blog post, Google noted that "mobile search traffic growth over the past three years is comparable to overall Google search traffic growth ... earlier in our history." Due to this exponential growth, including a  six-fold increase in mobile voice search traffic during the past year, Google has added voice recognition to the desktop.

Microsoft's Bing is Google's chief search engine rival in the U.S.  Google currently has 65 percent of the U.S. market. Bing controls most of the rest.

Google  also introduced a desktop Search by Image feature and increased the speed of searches with Instant Pages. Google provides an overview of its new features in its Inside Search blog.