Google upgrades search: improved suggest box and Quick Scroll

After a busy week of announcing new features, Google has two more to take us into the weekend.

Two tweaks to Google search have just been released that should make it easier to find the information you need quickly.

First up is an upgrade to the suggestions box that comes up as you type in a query. Now in addition to ideas for what you might be searching for, certain types of query, such as the weather, flight status or local time will give you the answer directly within the suggestion box.

This reportedly also works with area codes, package tracking, answers, definitions, calculator, currency and unit conversions.

The second upgrade is called Quick Scroll. This is a Chrome extension that makes it easy to find what you’re searching for within a page once Google has taken you to it. After conducting a search and selecting a result a box pops up at the bottom of the page that you can click on to to take you directly to the part of the page that mentions what you were searching for.

Until now the only way to achieve something similar to Quick Scroll was to select the Google cached version of a page, which highlights the search terms you used. Quick Scroll allows you to do a similar thing with the curently live page. In many cases this will be a much better option as the page is more likely to be up to date.

Quick scroll is in the Chrome Extensions Gallery. The upgrade to the suggest box is likely to take a few days to roll out to all users, if usual Google upgrades are anything to go by.