Google expands spoken search to desktop computers

By continually coming up with new ways to simplify search requests, Google hopes to extend its dominance in what so far has been Internet’s most lucrative market: steering people to the information they want as quickly as possible. Spurring more search requests provides Google with more opportunities to shows the ads that generate most of its revenue.

For now, the spoken-request option for desktop computers will be offered only on Google’s Chrome browser. It will be activated by clicking on a microphone icon inside Google’s search box. Chrome’s users will get the new feature within the next few days.

Google hopes to eventually make all the features available through Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox browsers, both which have wider audiences than Chrome. Eventually, people will be able to speak requests in other languages, too.

The speech-recognition technology draws upon a database of more than 230 billion words that Google has built while processing spoken requests on phones for the past two and a half years.

Another innovation is designed to load Web pages more quickly after users click on the top search result. The “Instant Pages’’ option, which also requires Chrome, builds upon a 9-month old feature in which search results automatically appear after typing in a few characters into a search box. The results change as more letters are typed in to complete the search query.

Google is hoping its browser gets another boost Wednesday. That’s when a new line of laptop computers running on an operating system based on Chrome will go on sale. The Chrome laptops from Acer Inc. and Samsung Electronics will cost $349 to $499 and require Internet connections to run most programs because they will have limited storage capacity, not hard drives.

Not all of Google’s latest search options will require Chrome. Among them is a new tool that allows users to drag images into Google’s search results to get a list of results about what’s in the photograph. For instance, a photo from a family vacation years ago could be dragged into the search box to get information about the location.