Earlier this year, you may recall that Google launched its search options, which allow users to have more customized control over their search results. It includes ways for users to browse results by videos, forums, reviews, etc.

A little over a month ago, a new real time search engine entered the scene. It was called Collecta, and while still in Beta, they have announced some big improvements today.

Today Yahoo introduced a new feature for its image search, which lets users refine searches based on specific locations. In other words, if you search for a place, you will get a menu on the left-hand side of the screen that points you to images of different points of interest from that location.

Since Bing’s launch, the search engine has garnered quite a bit of attention. This is no surprise since Microsoft invested so much money into marketing it. It may still be too early to tell, but it seems to be paying off so far. Bing’s numbers have edged up since its launch.

Today at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) conference in Miami, Google released a new research paper that looks at building a web-scale landmark-recognition engine. This could lay the groundwork for some interesting advancements in image search.

"To be clear up front, this is a research paper, not a new Google product, but we still think it’s cool," says Jay Yagnik, Head of Computer Vision Research.

It’s not all about traffic. It’s about conversions. But it’s hard to get conversions if you don’t have the traffic, and while Google is one of the best potential sources for traffic, Google has other search engines besides web search that people use all the time, and it will not hurt to rank in them too.

Google held its annual stockholders’ meeting yesterday evening and to accompany that Co-founder Sergey Brin decided to re-share the 2008 Founders’ Letter, which was originally published on Google’s Investor Relations site. Brin says they wanted to make this more widely available so they posted it on the Official Google Blog.

Google introduced a newly redesigned version of Google Labs today and a couple of new labs to go along with it. They rebuilt Google Labs from scratch with Google App Engine and moved it to GoogleLabs.com.

Well, Yahoo’s as good as its word.  Two weeks ago, the company showed off some image search improvements and promised more were on the way.  Now it’s announced a thorough overhaul of its image search preview page.

Google has launched a few new features for Insights for Search, which should make the tool even more useful to marketers than it already was. If you are unfamiliar with the tool, it was launched last summer, and it helps marketers find trends in search so they can be applied to your own marketing campaigns. It was discussed fairly extensively here.

Image search is probably not, to be honest, something that the average person uses every day.  For those occasions when you’re looking for just the right pic, though, Yahoo’s introduced a new set of filters that brings its engine roughly up to (and perhaps a bit beyond) the industry standard.