According to an announcement on the Official Google Blog , the search engine giant is rolling out a new format for their universal image results. Set to go live over the next 24 hours, the updated format will now feature one larger image alongside multiple smaller images. Because of this new layout, you’ll be able to see “more pictures than before,” writes Google Software Engineer Alex Petcherski in the blog post. Sponsor The New Image Results To be clear, this update is for universal image results only – not Google Image search itself. “Universal” results refer to the search results you receive when doing a traditional search on www.google.com. Introduced back in 2007, the term refers to the combined search results from multiple verticals, including image search, news, video search, and the other specialized engines linked from the top of Google’s homepage. With universal search, you only have to refer to one set search results page to see all the relevant information on a particular topic. The page serves as the jumping off point for whatever knowledge you’re after – whether that’s a photo, a video, the latest news, or just good ol’ fashioned information. The updated image search results represent a minor change to Google’s interface and one that many mainstream users may not have even noticed. But every little tweak that Google makes is only done after extensive testing. In this case, the update allows for one more image to appear in the universal image results box. One image may not seem like a major improvement, but it could mean the difference between a user clicking through to see more or abandoning their Google Search altogether. (You would be surprised how quickly some users give up on a non-productive search. Forget refining queries, they just go elsewhere or stop their search entirely!). Google Announcement’s Timing Aimed to Deflate Interest in Bing It’s also notable that Google is announcing this change around the same time as Microsoft plans to make another announcement regarding updated features for Bing , the company’s new search engine. Since its launch earlier this year, the Bing Search Team at Microsoft has been busy rolling out updates that have included things like a revamped mobile search , improvements to maps , integration with math engine Wolfram Alpha , Twitter integration , and a new visual search interface . As most of these announcements were made, Google would make an announcement of their own – for example, how they were planning on adding Twitter to their results, too . And when Bing announced Visual Search, Google posted to their blog about a Google Experiment called “Fast Flip” which lets you visually peruse print articles online. There’s no doubt that the timing of this latest, albeit minor, news about Image Search improvements has to do at least partially with the upcoming Bing announcement. Clearly, we have entered a new era of “search wars.” As angel investor Ron Conway noted earlier this fall at the TC50 conference, this time war is a good thing: “I think the huge winner here will be consumers because competition breeds innovation, and this nice little battle between Google and Microsoft is fantastic for consumers.” Disclosure: Sarah Perez also freelances for Microsoft’s Channel 10. She is not a Microsoft employee. Discuss

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Google Rolls Out New Format for Image Results

Some six months ago, we had a small conniption over an augmented reality application for Twitter on the iPhone. With the release of Twitter’s geotagging API, however, users were bound to see more and better AR apps for the popular microblogging service. Twitter 360 has just come up on our radar, and it looks like a dream from the outset. But will its features live up to user expectations? Sponsor Back in the day, we wrote of TwittARound, “You can see live tweets around your location and you can even see how far away they are. To accomplish this, TwittARound uses a combination of the iPhone’s compass and its accelerator-enabled GPS to determine the location of tweets and then layers those on top of a live video feed.” Sadly, Apple wouldn’t allow the app in the App Store and would only work on a jailbroken 3GS. How, then, does this new hotness compare? First, it’s not a full-featured Twitter client. The team plans to add more features as time goes by, but with so little time between the official geotagging API’s announcement and this application’s debut, we’re clearly looking at a case of “launch early, launch often.” On startup, the app updates a user’s location automatically, and it also allows for an “invisible mode” during which the user isn’t discoverable through digital means. For users who have enabled the geotagging feature in Twitter, the app annotates tweets with location information. That users’ friends can then see, via augmented reality, the location from where that user’s last tweet was posted. The Latest Tweets mode shows the latest tweets of followed users and the location from where they were posted. When a tweet is selected, the users sees a blue arrow indicating the direction and distance to the location from where the tweet was posted. In Locate my Friends mode users can find their friends, again with a blue arrow showing the distance and direction to a friend’s location. Moreover, Twitter 360 plays nicely with Google Maps: Currently, the app is available on 3GS devices only. And yes: It’s made it to the App Store . Check out this nifty demo video, and let us know what you think in the comments: Discuss

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New Twitter AR App Powered by Geotagging API

Earlier this morning, Mozilla released the fourth beta version of Firefox 3.6 . Besides over 140 bug fixes , the new beta also introduces support for HTML5′s local file handling API. This feature gives web apps the ability to access and handle local files selected by the user. A photo site that implements this feature can now work with images locally, for example. You don’t have to upload your images to the site – instead, the web app can just manipulate the photo through the browser locally and an upload is only necessary if you want to store the image remotely. Sponsor The development of Firefox 3.6 has fallen behind schedule, though barring any major bugs in this latest version, Mozilla will likely release the first release candidate next month and the final version should arrive early next year. Local File Handling Another example that Mozilla uses in its documentation is photo thumbnails. Normally, you would have to upload the image to the site’s server before you could see a thumbnail. Now, developers can easily render and display these thumbnail before the file is uploaded. Support for the HTML5 file handling API is the only major new feature in this latest beta, though Mozilla also made some tweaks to how extensions integrate with Firefox, which should improve stability. Help Mozilla to Test Add-Ons Mozilla also recently launched the latest version of its Add-on Compatibility Reporter tool . If you want to help out Mozilla and your favorite add-on developers, this tool will send back information about how an add-on performs in whatever version of Firefox you have installed on your machine. About 70% of all Firefox add-ons are already compatible with Firefox 3.6. Discuss

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New Firefox 3.6 Beta Enables Local File Handling

Opera just announced the release of Opera 10.10 . This latest version of Opera’s desktop browser now includes Opera Unite , the company’s browser-based web server. With Unite, users can share photos, music, notes, websites, forums and calendars – but unlike standard web apps, these apps are hosted on the user’s computer. When Opera first talked about Unite, it claimed that this service would “reinvent the web.” This resulted in a lot of hype before the announcement and the inevitable backlash right afterward. When we tested the first alpha version of Opera with the built-in Unite feature, however, we came away quite impressed . Sponsor As usual, this latest version of Opera is available for a wide variety of operating systems, including Windows, OSX, FreeBSD, Solaris and Linux. Your Browser is Now Also a Server Opera Unite allows you to easily turn your desktop into a web server and run a number of web services like photo-sharing, file-sharing, a web server, and an online media player right from your machine and access all of these services from anywhere. While this gives you control over your media, it also means that your data is only available online as long as your computer is running. Starting a Unite server takes seconds (though you need an Opera account to make this work). Opera will assign an address to your computer based on your username. Users can choose if they want to protect their applications with passwords or if they want to make them available to anybody on the net. Nothing New Besides Unite Besides Opera Unite, this latest version doesn’t sport any major new features. With features like Opera Turbo, bookmark syncing, and the sleek new visual tabs design that Opera introduced in the last update, Opera 10 does have a lot of things going for it. In our tests this morning, the browser was stable and fast. Even though we didn’t run any benchmarks, Opera 10 felt just as fast as any other modern browser. For more information about Opera Unite, also have a look at our more in-depth review of the service and the apps that Opera includes by default. Discuss

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Your Browser is Now a Web Server: Opera Includes Opera Unite in Opera 10.10