The search engine innovation frenzy goes on, as both Google, Bing and Yahoo! refine their search toolboxes.

Google translate gets some new features

Google Translate let’s you translate both copied text and complete web pages.

This week Google changed some of the features available. You no longer have to click on the translate button to generate a translation. Instead Google starts translating as soon as you enter text in the the text box.

Google has also added romanization of non-Latin characters. The Google Blog puts it this way:

Want to say “Today is a good day” in Chinese, but can’t read Han characters? Click “Show romanization” to read the text written phonetically in English. Right now, this works for all non-Roman languages except for Hebrew, Arabic and Persian.

Google has also added a speaker icon. Click on it to have Google read the translation out loud. This only works for translations to English. The Google lady does not know how to pronounce Norwegian, yet.

Here’ s a video describing the new features:

Google Image Swirl

Google is testing a new interface for image browsing called Image Swirl.

When you search for an object or motive Swirl will first present you with a result page with three rows of relevant images or stacks of images.

Click on one of these images and Google will show you the content of that stack as a kind of radar plot of similar or related images.

Swirl will also connect that radar plot with other similar plots of images, helping you to find identify — let’s say — pictures of the Eiffel tower at day as opposed to night motives.

Google Swirl is based on the same technology as the “similar image” feature of Google Image Search.

The Google Blog says that Image Swirl currently works for more than 200,000 queries. Google plan to include more queries in the future. Available queries will auto-complete as you start to type in the search box, similar to Google Suggest.

A tricky, but interesting question, is who are going to use this image search and for what. After all, most online images are under copyright protection. We suspect the arrival of more and more advanced image search tools may undermine the public’s respect for intellectual property rights.

Google’s new breadcrumbs in web search results

Most searchers don’t notice, but Google has always included the URL to the relevant web page in its search result listings — in a green color.

If the URL includes important keywords relevant for the searcher, this link may be useful, but truth to be told, most people just ignore it. We only glance at it to see if the results are from sitse we know and trust.

Google clearly believe that this link can be made more useful, for this week it has started experimenting with a new way of displaying URLs. In addition to the URL it will add links to relevant subsections of the site, like this:

www.productwiki.com › Toys & Games › Robots

A you can see, it shortens the URL to the domain name only. Google then adds links to relevant pages on the site itself.

Google says:

The new text provides useful information about the page. You can tell that the ProductWiki site has information about many different products, organized in different categories, and you can even tell that Spidersapien [the product] is a robot toy.

The Google Sidebar may become permanent

Unlike Bing and Yahoo, Google does not have a permanent left hand sidebar with additional links for more narrow searches. Instead there is a link at the top of the page called “Show options”.

Click on it and Google will add a sidebar which helps you refine your search query. You may, for instance, limit your search to new pages from the last hour.

Search Engine Land reports that Google will change it’s search result pages next year and give them a more coherent look and feel.

Most importantly: It seems the sidebar will become a permanent feature on all search result pages.

The sidebar will include links to Images, News, Books, Maps and “More”, as well as related searches and links that let you limit the search to a specific time period.

Google will give you the alternatives (or “modes”) it thinks is most relevant to your search.

Ask.com launched search result pages like this in 2007. Because of this Ask.com became one of our favorite search engines. Ask later abandoned its “3D” search in order to become more like Google!

Bing adds news links for selected news sites

Google is not the only one adding new features to its search engine tool box.

Bing now adds direct links to the latest news headlines to searches for major news sites.

Here is a search for “New York Times”:

If you live outside the US, you may not see such results. Go to the Bing Search Worldwide settings page and select “United States – English” to get access to the real deal.

Bing includes data from Wolfram Alpha

As many of our reader’s will have noticed, we are not completely satisfied with the Wolfram Alpha fact search engine.

We think the search syntax is to complex for the average user. Still, Bing has made a deal with the company and has started to include Alpha results on its search result pages.

Bing has, for instance, started with searches for nutrition and fitness:

The Bing Community Blog explains:

When you search for specific food items on Bing, you’ll get a nutrition quick tab that allows you to learn more about it. You also get a nutrition facts label at the bottom of the results page that summarizes all information on that food item in a very familiar and friendly format.

Bing’s new video search portal

Bing has also launched a new portal for video search . It is elegant and easy to browse, and gives direct access to videos that are “hot” or popular right now.

The videos are fetched from Microsoft’s own sites, but also from sites like ABC, Hulu, and YouTube.

Yahoo adds Twitter news

Yahoo! has also added a new feature for searchers.

Twitter is now one of four tabs appearing under news related search results at the top of the search result page. (The other three are News, Photos and Videos).

A click on the Twitter tab opens a frame in the search result page with a couple of tweets as well as relevant videos. There is a “more” link that forwards your query to the Twitter search engine.

Over at the Yahoo! Search Blog Ivan Davtchev and Nitzan Achsaf of Yahoo! Search say that “Many of you are already familiar with the existing Yahoo! News Shortcut, which displays headlines on our Web search results page when you look for news stories. The enhanced shortcut with these new tabs will now display for many breaking or major news searches.”

Bing added Twitter to its search arsenal in October.