Google may have revamped its homepage recently, but with its latest development there’s no need to type anything at all to search – just take a photo instead. Called Visual Search (codenamed Google Goggles) the tech will be hitting Android handsets in the near future.
The system was demoed on CNBC’s show Inside the Mind of Google where Google Product Manager Hartmut Neven took a picture of Santa Monica pier and then sent the image to Google for crunching and it correctly identified it and brought back the right search results.
“Imagine you’re a tourist and you arrive at this place and you would like to know more about it, all you will have to do is take a shot of the [Santa Monica pier] sign and you see we recognized this as the Santa Monica pier,” Neven said.
Neven joined Google in 2006 when his startup Neven Vision, which specialised in face and image recognition, was acquired by the search giant.
The Google Visual Search system can also hook into location data and tie all the information together with advertising – for example, a user could take a picture of a billboard advert to get more information on a product or service.
There’s no firm timetable for Google Visual Search’s rollout, but it will be hitting Android phones at some point. As to whether it’ll also pop up on iPhones as well, Google isn’t saying at the moment.
