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Google’s just rolled out two new features — answer highlights in search results and rich snippets for events — in the ongoing process to improve the underlying technology and functionality of its core product: Search.

While the technology behind these updates is quite sophisticated, the actual purpose is simple: to actually provide answers instead of just results to your Google search queries.

The first new feature, answer highlighting, attempts to complete your search query by bolding the answer in the result. So now when you search, results will include bold words that Google deems to be the answer. This is a nifty little development — powered by Google Squared research — that’s especially handy and convenient, as prior to the feature update Google was simply bolding search keywords.

As Google admits, answer highlighting won’t work with all your queries, but it is very effective with searches around information that could fit in a table. Hence the inspiration and use of Google Squared data. Try it out on “empire state height” and you should actually get the height of the Empire State Building in bold at the top of the results page.

The second update — rich snippets for events — is more for webmasters, but the net benefit is that Google will now better answer your event-related queries. Should webmasters annotate their pages to support the new format, you’ll find that your event search will return more pertinent data. So results with events will show all events as snippets under the master listing broken up into individual links that highlight the event name, date and location.

Both of these updates are subtle on the surface and will probably go unnoticed by the average searcher. Should the newly applied technology work as promised, however, these updates could help continue to distinguish Google Search from all the rest.

Twitter has begun rolling out location-based trending topics.

The product is officially called Local Trends. In a statement to us, Twitter said the following:

“We’re rolling out local trends to 1 percent of users today, but we’ll share more information when it reaches a larger audience hopefully sometime next week. We’ll keep you posted when that happens.”

The pictures below, courtesy of @lisabarone, show the new feature in all of its glory. Scroll past them for more information on the new Twitter feature.

Screenshots: Local Trends

More Info

Currently, only a few users have access to the feature (I don’t have it yet), but it should be rolling out to everybody soon.

Here’s what we can tell you:

- Local Trends allows you to set a specific location, so that you can see the trends around you. Most of the time, this would be your home. However, it looks like you can change it on-the-fly if you’re traveling, for example.

- Clicking on Local Trends gives you a list of different cities and countries in which you can view trends. It’s a limited list so far — only 15 U.S. cities are supported.

- You can access these trending topics from Twitter.com, on the right-hand column.

- A full rollout should occur sometime next week, if testing goes smoothly.

We think this is a logical and smart move, especially in the wake of the rise of location-based service such as Foursquare. We’ll have more analysis soon.

What did people buzz about the most this week? Who was the singer that people tweeted the most about? What issue caught the world’s collective attention?

Social media is not only a great medium for conversation, but it’s also an effective way to discover and analyze the popular topics of the day. By aggregating and picking apart the millions of tweets, status updates, and posts generated on the web every day, it’s possible to figure out what people care about in real-time.

Starting this week, we will be publishing the top ten trending topics of the last seven days, based on the amount of time they trended on Twitter. This data is provided to us courtesy of What The Trend, which tracks Twitter trends and provides user-generated descriptions of those topics.

What Was Hot This Week

Here are some of our thoughts and observation on Twitter’s top ten trending topics for the week:

- Unsurprisingly, the most discussed topic of the week has been the crisis in Haiti. After a 7.0 earthquake devastated Haiti, the world came to the people’s aid, raising millions via text message and other social methods.

- The Shorty Awards, which recognize great twitter users and their content, trended for nearly four days. It’s become more popular than even we predicted.

- Both Martin Luther King Day and the Massachusetts special election between Scott Brown and Martha Coakley took up two trending topics. Martin Luther King Day was on Monday, while the Massachusetts election occurred on Tuesday.

- In the realm of entertainment, Justin Bieber, the Golden Globes, and Jersey Shore were the most talked about items of the weel.

Be sure to scroll down to the end of the post for the full list.

What Might Be Popular Next Week?

What do you think will be the topics people discuss the most next week? We have a few guesses, but we want to hear yours in the comments.

Some of our predictions:

1. Apple’s announcement, including the Apple Tablet and the unveiling of iPhone 4.0.

2. The Grammy Awards, which air on 1/31, will garner a lot of discussion next week, along with some of its singers.

3. The plight in Haiti, as well as ways to help, will continue to dominate the discussion.

Top 10 Twitter Trending Topics, 1/16 to 1/22

All descriptions are provided courtesy of What The Trend.

Technology has played an important role not only in getting relief to those affected by the Haiti earthquake, but in getting information out about how the quake affected the island nation.

CNN contributes a new series of immersive information visualizations in these 360 degree panoramic videos, where you can completely control the camera’s view during playback as well as zoom in and out.

Shot over the last week in Haiti’s capital of Port-au-Prince, the videos are powered by technology from Immersive Media — the same company that helped power much of Google’s Street View.

Have a look at the interactive videos at full size and let us know what you think.

t appears that the Nexus One’s speech-to-text function performs the digital equivalent of washing your mouth out with soap.

Reuters discovered that the innovative voice recognition feature converts swear words into a string of # symbols when rendered into text.

Why the censorship? A spokesperson from Google says the “feature” is less about sanitizing users’ speech and more about making sure curse words don’t accidentally appear in transcriptions erroneously, a real possibility given the early and not always accurate state of voice recognition technology.

“We filter potentially offensive or inappropriate results because we want to avoid situations whereby we might misrecognize a spoken query and return profanity when, in fact, the user said something completely innocent,” the statement said.

Fair enough. Although that seems to imply that one day, when the technology improves, Nexus One users may see their right to be foul-mouthed returned. One can only ###ing hope.

The Creative Live! Range of webcams which includes Live! Cam Sync, Live! Cam Chat IM, Live! Cam Socialize, Live! Cam Socialize HD, and Live! Cam Optia AF has been released.

These Creative range of Webcams come with VGA 300k Pixels, 800 x 600 video and photo, and a USB Video Class. In addition to the basic features Live! Cam Sync has improved eye-level conferencing while the Live Cam Chat IM carries a built-in microphone. Live Cam Socialize supports 1.3 Mega pixels photos wherein the Live Cam Socialize HD adds on high definition sensor along with the 1280 x 720 widescreen video and 3.7 megapixel photos compared to the previous version. The high end Live Cam Optia AF consists of a glass lens, 2 megapixel video, 8 megapixel photos, and built-in stereo microphone with Noise cancellation.

Webcams from Creative support Window 7 and are compatible with Mac and Linux.

Back in May of this year we had published a story stating that the website and retailer GeekIT had started a website that allows users to register their mobile handset’s IMEI numbers. For some strange reason though we’ve been getting a lot of traffic with readers leaving their IMEI numbers in our comments, which is not a good idea since we can’t do this for you as it requires you to enter your own personal information on the site.

For those who wish to register their handsets here’s the link you need to use -
http://www.imeidata.com/

When Google asked what you liked and disliked about their new real-time communication application, you unquestionably said that you wanted more invites to share with friends and family. Problem solved.

Today, Google decided to play Santa with Wave invites. It has just doled out significantly more invites to existing users.

In conjunction with the invite rollout, Google is also hinting that they’ll soon reach the one million user mark. The title of their post suggestively indicates that “a million stamps” have been licked, which we take to mean that they’ve now opened up Google Wave to a million users.

While invites may be more readily available, be forewarned: Google is still not ready to graduate the service from preview phase to beta stage. Still, we’re excited that more of you can get in on the shared experience that is Google Wave.

The day has finally come. As we were expecting, Google has just released Chrome for Mac, which can now be downloaded by Mac OS X 10.5 or later users.

If you’re anything like us, you’ve been anxiously awaiting the chance to get your hands on the new browser since last year’s release of the Windows version.

Of course, Google Chrome for Mac is just a beta release, and, as we’ve previously reported, you won’t be able to use applications like Gmail that run on Google Gears, but you can take advantage of other Chrome improvements such as speed and Google search right from the address bar.

Here’s a video demo that Google has released:

After you install Chrome on your Mac, you can optionally import your Safari or Firefox settings, which means your bookmarks and certain preferences can carry over from your existing favorite browser. Given that Google Chrome Extensions should launch any day, you might not even have to live without your favorite add-ons for very long (though at this time extensions are not available for the Mac version).

We’ve just installed it for ourselves, and after taking it out for a test drive, our first impressions are that this thing is slick. While we compile our notes, let us know what you think of Google Chrome for Mac in the comments.