Google Goggles: Now search gets eyes and ears

Google's first search engine let people search by typing text onto a Web page. Next came queries spoken over the phone. On Monday, Google announced the ability to perform an Internet search by submitting a photograph.

The experimental search-by-sight feature, called Google Goggles, has a database of billions of images that informs its analysis of what's been uploaded, said Vic Gundotra, Google's vice president of engineering. It can recognize books, album covers, artwork, landmarks, places, logos, and more.

It is said that Google's aim is to be able to identify any image. It represents their earliest efforts in the field of computer vision. You can take a picture of an item, use that picture of whatever you take as the query.

Vic Gundotra, Google's vice president of engineering, takes a photo of the Itsukushima Shrine in Japan. The Google Goggles feature successfully identified it.

However, the feature is still in Google Labs to deal with the "nascent nature of computer vision" and with the service's present shortcomings. "Google Goggles works well on certain types of objects in certain categories.

Google Goggles was one of the big announcements at an event at the Computer History Museum here to tout the future of Google search. The company also showed off real-time search results and translation of a spoken phrase from English to Spanish using a mobile phone.

Search results to include ‘real-time’ data. In a related development, fresh information from blogs, news sites, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and other popular hangouts will appear in Google’s search results more quickly as the company aims to give people a more comprehensive look at what’s happening on the Web.

The feature, unveiled on Monday, represents Google Inc.’s most significant step yet in the field of ‘real-time’ search — a catch phrase for the torrent of information constantly being shared on blogs and the personal pages of social-networking sites.

As those destinations have turned into increasingly popular forums for swapping opinions, offering news tips and highlighting interesting stories, Google, Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. all have been scrambling to retool their search engines so they reel in and showcase real-time data more rapidly.

What do you think guys, isn't this just amazing, just connect your mobile to the computer and the pictures gets you the related results, I mean no need to type at all, even pictures getting recognised, bet this technology is used to recognize people also, like put up their photo and get all the query regarding them, but then how this technology will be used is anybody's guess at the moment. As a user what is your first impression of this new technology from Google? share your views