What's Michelle Williams's Bacon number, you ask? It's two and no — that's not the number of bacon strips she had to eat this morning; it's the degree of separation between Kevin Bacon and the award-winning actress, aka her Bacon number. Now it's readily available on the Internet, thanks to the Google Knowledge Graph.

The project is part of the search giant's effort to make online discovery more intelligent and informative (plus a bit more fun, we'd say!). To account for something like the Bacon number, Google looks at relationships not just between search terms, but also between real people, places, and events.

Read more about Michelle and the Google Knowledge Graph after the jump

What was on the world's mind in 2011? Rebecca Black, according to Google's Zeitgeist 2011 roundup. The teen singer's viral video wonder "Friday" had over 167 million view on YouTube, and searches for her name made it the number one fastest-rising search term on the site in 2011.

Google's Zeitgeist review of the year is largely made up of the fastest-rising search terms in categories such as people, entertainment, consumer electronics, and news for every region worldwide. Interestingly, the fastest-falling searches are also listed with the once top social network, MySpace, securing the number one spot for losing the most global interest online this year.

Here's a detail of the fastest-moving US search terms in their respective categories:

• Google News — Hurricane Irene
• Image Search — Planking
• Google Maps — International airport, with Ikea not far behind at number two
• Product Search — HP TouchPad

For a closer look at the world's last 12 months through an Internet lens, get your tissues ready to watch Google's 2011 year in review video after the break.

Google unveiled some hot new search capabilities earlier today in San Francisco, which are available on the latest version of the Google Chrome browser. Though some of you didn't like the Google Instant feature that rolled out last year, there has been another update to Instant that will shave seconds off of your page-load time. Find out more about it as well as the other announcements below!

Voice Search in Chrome

Now alongside your regular text searches on the Google homepage, you can click the microphone button on the search bar and speak your search instead. This is handy for those times when you don't know how to spell something or are on the move. It's the same reliable search you know on your mobile device, just on your laptop or desktop. Rolling out now in English, voice search should be widely available soon.

Search by Image

We love Google Goggles for its ability to translate photos in real time, show us the sky, and more, but now you can search by image on your desktop as well. Next to the microphone button on the Google Images search page, there will now be a camera button to click on when you're ready to search. Either upload a pic from your PC, or plug in a URL for an image for Google to reference, and you'll find out what the image is, what it says, or where the captured landmark is located. Available now on Chrome in 40 languages, there will also be Chrome and Firefox extensions that will enable you to right click an image to search.

Instant Pages

First there was Google Instant, but now there's Google Instant Pages. This feature actually begins loading the top search results in the background of your web browser, allowing you faster page loads when you do decide to click the top search result links. This will save you about two to five seconds on average. Google Instant Pages will be available in the next Chrome beta release.

Check out a demo of the new Chrome Google voice search function, just keep reading

It seems like just yesterday we were wrapping up 2009, and here we are looking forward to 2011; how the year has flown by! Google may not have produced any particularly "shocking" headlines in 2010, but the company has brought lots of new tools to the table — like incredible (and incredibly cheap) voice calling features, and most recently, notebooks; but it's obvious that Google's search function is the company's bread and butter.

You remember the tear-jerking search commercials that aired during this year's Super Bowl? Yeah. Pretty awesome. So it's fitting that the company chose to recap 2010 in search, taking us back through the biggest headlines of the year. Tell us which world event was most memorable to you after watching Google's latest video after the break.

Today's announcement from Google brought a pretty big change in the way we search. Google Instant is amazing, and amazingly fast, but not everyone is as excited about change as Google is. If you're not a fan of the fast-loading, search-predicting new feature, there is a way to turn it off.

Find out how after the jump.

This morning at the SF MOMA, Google's VP of Search, Marissa Mayer, announced Google's "fundamental shift" to search — Google Instant, which streams search results as you're typing. Instead of hitting the enter key to obtain search results, your results will now pop up as you're keying in your search query. Google Instant even comes with a bit of a "psychic" ability, as it can actually predict what you're about to type — search predictions will show up in your search bar in light gray text. You can even tab through auto-complete results with your up and down buttons, which will bring you dynamic results for each option you select.

According to Google, Instant search can save you three to five seconds per search, which equals 11 hours for every passing second for all Google users! Amazing! Google Instant will be rolling out beginning today on Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and IE 8 browsers and for signed-in users in the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and Spain. Google also says this feature will be rolling out to smartphones later this Fall, and into your browsers' search box over the next few months.

Want to check out a demo video? Check out what's under the hood of Google Instant and see it in action after the jump.

Google is smart. Really smart. Take this tip, which I recently read in the latest issue of Real Simple: to narrow down your search, use a hyphen before words you don't want included in the search results. Say you want to find information on ravens — the actual bird, not the football team from Baltimore. So enter "ravens -football -Baltimore." The returned results will omit those including football.

Smart, right? The hyphen acts as a minus sign, so Google knows not to return results including those words or phrases. The same logic also works with a plus sign, so if you're looking for a super-specific result (like that movie title that is right on the tip of your tongue), use the + sign in between search terms to narrow down your search.

The next time you drop in to a new city or just wander into a new part of town you're not familiar with, Google wants to make it easier to find your way. Even if you don't have Google Maps installed on your Android or iPhone handsets, you can find the nearest ATM, coffee shop, bar, or restaurant with a single web page.

By pointing your mobile web browser to Google.com and allowing Google to access your location, you can then tap into Near Me Now, Google's latest lab for mobile. I tested it last night while hunting for a place to grab a late-night bite with some friends and can tell you that it's easy to use and gave me lots of results even though it showed a message saying that my GPS signal was too weak (in gray writing under the "Explore right here" field). Near Me Now even lets you save locations as favorites to remember later.

If you're news obsessed and want to get the latest updates on a particular subject, Google is here to help. Google announced yesterday at an event in Mountain View, CA, that over the next several days, it will be rolling out real-time results search that automatically updates when anything new is posted to the Internet on your specific subject search. Results will include news sites, blogs, Facebook, and Twitter just to name a few, which makes it easy to stay on top of new developments.

I've often marveled at Twitter's ability to autorefresh when there's a new tweet in my feed, which is where Google got the goods to incorporate it into their technology after striking up a deal at this year's Web 2.0 conference.