The search giant is taking two mobile search features to the desktop, enabling voice and image search with Voice Search and Search by Image, as announced at the Inside Search press event in San Francisco. They will also offer Google Instant on Images and Instant Pages for faster search results.

Voice search has been existing on mobile devices since 2008 but it isn’t widely utilized since users normally type their searches. Google aims at making voice search universally available. It comes off as handy for long queries and words that are difficult to spell, as well as if you’re just into talking up your searches rather than typing them. It seems faster and easier that way depending on the situation, and a more natural language approach to interacting with inanimate devices. The new voice search leverages Chrome’s Speech API and will be available to users using Chrome 11 and up (in English) starting next week. Just click the microphone icon, speak your search out loud and Google will do the rest for you.

Search by Image, on the other hand, eliminates the hassle of having to think up words, phrases or sentences to describe an image, and allows users to upload the image instead, to search for the same exact photo or similar photos of its kind. Go to images.google.com and just put the image in the search box. You can place the image in the search box by clicking the camera icon and uploading the photo; simply copying the URL of an image, dragging and dropping the image from a webpage or from your computer to the search box. You can also download Chrome and Firefox extensions when it rolls out in the next couple of days to expedite the image search process.

“The technology behind Search by Image analyzes your image to find its most distinctive points, lines and textures and creates a mathematical model. We match that model against billions of images in our index, and page analysis helps us derive a best guess text description of your image.

“Search by Image technology also includes the ability to match against images on the web so that we can show you similar images and webpages that contain your image.”

Since speed was one of Google Inside Search event’s themes, they introduced Google Images with Instant. It will be generally available over the next couple of months, but if you want you can check out google.com/experimental to become one of the beta users. Google Instant was first introduced last fall and was only applicable to text searches. Instant pages on Chrome predicts searches as they are typed, spoken or uploaded (for images). The results that the search engine is confident enough to be accurate will be loaded ahead as they are predicted, so when the user clicks the link, the search will spare him the extra seconds spent on loading. Learn more about these Instant Pages on Chromium Blog.

In other Google news, the company invested $280 million in residential solar project, summing up their clean technology investment to $680 million. SolarCity customers will include Google employees, and is specifically targeting home owners who wants solar panels on their roofs but don’t have the cash for it just yet. The panel leases will run for up to 15 years.