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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.

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.

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.

Google’s introduced a new “Translated search” tool in the Search Options panel that makes finding and reading content written in other languages easier.

Translated search helps users find information from sites written in other languages. This feature was present in Google Translate for a while, but has now been integrated fully into Google search, making it easier for to find and read results from pages across the web, even if they weren’t written in a language that the searcher speaks.

When a user search on Google for something in his/her own language, this tool can be used to search the web in another language. Click “Show Options” at the top ofthe search results page and select “Translated search” to try it out. Google will algorithmically select the best language(s) to translatethe search query into and then return translated results from those pages. Results from multiple languages will also be displayed.

The latest Chrome beta build ushers in a great new feature: bookmark syncing. If you use multiple computers, or even just appreciate a cloud backup of your browser bookmarks, this feature will be a boon.

You can grab the new beta build 4.0.223.16 here, which also includes speed improvements by as much as 30% since the current stable release. For more information on how the bookmark sync works in the new build, head on past the break for an introductory video from the Chrome team.

Whether it’s a laptop and desktop, machines at home and at work, or just more than one machine in the house, it’s a pain to try to keep them in sync — you inevitably don’t have access to that one bookmark you’re looking for no matter which machine you’re on. That’s undoubtedly the reason Xmarks syncing extension was so popular in our “Favorite Firefox extensions” Lunchtime Poll.

The bookmark syncing feature actually debuted earlier in the developer version of the browser, but required setting a command-line flag. Now that Chrome supports bookmarking sync natively — if only in beta — will any of you consider switching or perhaps just adding it to your browser arsenal?

Remember that for now, unfortunately, this is only enabled in the Windows version of Chrome (Mac users are sadly still waiting for an official version). You’ll also have to of course download the beta and also enable each computer individually for syncing, by choosing “Synchronize my bookmarks” from the Wrench menu.

Check out the video below and let us know if you plan to use the new syncing feature in Chrome beta.

Way back in April, Google relaunched Google Labs, the place where the company tests its new and experimental features. When it relaunched, it added a very interesting experimental feature to Google Image Search: Similar Images.

A recap if you don’t remember similar images: it utilizes image recognition technology to help filter search results. If you find an action shot of soccer/football star David Beckham and want to find more like it, for example, you can use Similar Images to filter your results and find similar images.

The feature has been in Google Labs for over half a year, but that’s no longer the case. Google has announced that Similar Images has now become a standard feature of Google Image search.

It was only a matter of time until Similar Images made its debut in Google Search. It’s a very useful and surprisingly accurate feature that really helps you filter images. We can expect to see a lot of users utilizing this feature very soon.

Google Docs has become a viable tool for web workers and businesses looking to create, manage, and share their word processing, presentation, and spreadsheet files in the cloud. To-date, however, if you’ve wanted to take your data out of the cloud and download it to your desktop, you would have to do so one document at a time. But today, Google announced the “Convert, Zip and Download” feature in Google Docs to tackle this challenge. The new features make it a simple two step process to pull down any and all the Google documents of your choosing (up to 500 MB), convert them to your preferred file types, and zip them up in a concrete package you can download and save to your desktop.

The new feature is accessible from the Google Docs home page, and all that is required is that you select the files you wish to download, click the “More actions” tab, and select “Export.” You’ll then be guided through the straightforward process, which will let you convert your files to a number of different formats, including PDF, .xls, and .doc. Once you hit continue, the file zipping process automatically begins.

Though Convert, Zip and Download is a rather unsexy update to Google Docs , it should prove to be an incredibly handy utility and time saver should the need arise to ever export all your data out of Google. We can thank the Google Data Liberation Front for today’s important update, and we can expect even more liberation features in Google products in the future.

One of the sticking points with the otherwise highly convenient Google Voice service has been that you had a choose a new number to use with the service. If you had an existing number that everyone already knew and wanted to switch over, you were pretty much out of luck.

Luckily that changes today, with tonight’s Google announcement that you can now use Google Voice with an existing phone number. Also notably, you can now add Google voicemail service to any of the mobile numbers linked to your account. Think of it a bit like Gmail for voicemail.

Now when you first sign up for Google Voice you can choose between using your own number or choosing a new Google number. You still get many of Google Voice’s features when using your own number, including the Google voicemail feature you can now add to linked phones.

Unfortunately it’s not a full number port, and you won’t get all of the Google Voice features when using your own number — at least not yet. But especially if you have an older phone that doesn’t already have a nice visual voicemail interface, the Google voicemail feature alone might be reason enough to switch. The company also says it plans to roll out a full service compatible with your existing number, including other great features of Voice like conference calling, call screening, and listening into calls before deciding to pick up.

Check out the video about how Google voicemail works below. And if you’re still hunting for an invite to Google Voice, you can ask a us for one.

Do you use Google Voice? If not, will you consider using the service now that you can keep your existing number? Let us know in the comments.