Search experts are coming away from Google’s Search Event, held on December 7th in Mountain View, CA, with two words on their lips: “exciting” and “scary.” Both words aptly describe the most buzz-worthy new product to be unveiled at the event: Google Goggles.
In classic Google fashion, there is a friendly video overview of Google Goggles over at the Google Mobile Blog. For those who haven’t viewed it yet, Goggles brings picture search to Android phones in a big, big way. Here’s how it works:
- Using your Android phone, you snap a picture of a logo, a book cover, or even a storefront.
- Google Goggles identifies the object and then kicks back relevant information, whether its search results, user reviews, price comparisons or store hours.
- You can save your visual search history just like you save your regular search history via a web browser.
The examples on the website are pretty impressive. A snapshot of a certain iconic bridge in San Francisco makes Goggles instantly spit back “Golden Gate Bridge” and offer a Wikipedia entry for perusal, while a picture of a business card automatically parses out the name, phone number and email address.
But what’s more exciting, and scary, are the capabilities that Google Goggles will wield once it emerges from its infancy. The exciting aspects of visual search are easy to fathom. There’s many a time words fail us when we try to come up with an effective search query. Questions like: “What species of tree did this leaf come from?”, or “What kind of pill is this?”, or “Is this rash contagious?” will be far more answerable (much in the same way Midomi revolutionized the “name that tune” conundrum).
Read the rest of this article at ReveNews.
Photo by lietus
