Google Adds Live Sports Results, Emergency Contacts and Instant Previews

In another weekly installment, Google has provided an overview of updates and changes to the search engine in the past week. Since Google regularly makes several updates and launches new features, big and small, every week, it sometimes doesn't do a full blog post announcement for all of them, hence the weekly round up.

"We’re always excited by the diversity of the search features and enhancements that we make in any given week. Each week we try to release a diverse set of search feature and enhancement to help you find what you’re looking for, faster," Johanna Wright, Director of Search Product Management at Google, wrote.

"From getting sports information instantly, to making it even easier for you to find the right webpage, this week’s round up includes a slew of new changes," she said.

This week, Google introduced live sports results for NHL matches. Doing an NHL-related search will bring up additional information about the week's or the team's matches.

Live scores are displayed, when matches are played, but also the schedule for future matches. There are links to additional content, like recaps and highlights, as well as links to ticket sites for upcoming matches.

Google has had live match results before, for example, during the World Cup this summer.

Google has also rolled out a feature only available in the US until now to a number of new countries. For certain emergency searches Google provides direct links and contact information for things like poison control and suicide prevention.

This feature is now available in 13 more countries: Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the U.K.

Finally, Google introduced a big new feature, Instant Previews, which add visual snippets of the pages in the search results. This makes it easier to spot pages you'd want to visit as opposed to link-bait ones and also easier to see if the content you want is available on a certain page.