Google Goggles

Posted by Alan Sanders on May 23, 2011 in Telegram Past News

Google established itself as the leader in online search engines when it revolutionized the market for search engines on the web.  Google has not only become the leading search engine, but the word itself has evolved into a verb used to describe searching something online.  In a world where it’s common to hear the phrase, “Google it”, this company continues to lead the pack while committing itself into further bettering its services.  A new program called Google Goggles allows users to create a search through a picture.  All you have to do is open the app, take a picture of what you want to search and let Google work its witchcraft to return the most relevant results.

This software is very similar to face recognition software in the sense that it tries to recognize objects and words in a picture, but the concept is expanded to cover anything the user may want to snap a photo of and search.  For example, someone might take a picture of a piece of artwork that they find appealing and find out more about it or they might take a picture of text in Spanish to translate it into English. 

This program solves the problem that comes about when one doesn’t know what search words to use when trying to research something.  If you don’t know what it’s called to begin with, how are you going to search it?  The answer is Google Goggles. 

This product is good when it recognizes the object in question, however the software is still hit and miss on whether it will actually work or not.  In its current stage, the program won’t work with animals, furniture and apparel, but these items should eventually be able to be recognized by the program.

In the future, this kind of searching may become more efficient than trying to search through key words like one must do now, but for the time being, the program is really only useful when trying to translate text.  Even when trying to take a picture of something as popular as an iPod touch (granted it was somewhat scratched), the program didn’t recognize the object.  Once the searching is refined, this will be much easier to use and perform simple searches.

Google Goggles is available on Android version 1.6 or higher and iOS 4.0.  This service is free to download, but uses data to retrieve search results on mobile devices.  For now, this service is rather inaccurate, but it definitely has the potential to revolutionize search engines in the future.