Google Goggles - Use pictures to search the web

Google has once again come up with an exciting way to make search more easy for the users. Now to know more about something you don’t need to google a phrase, simply take its picture and there it is - all the relevant information related to it within seconds, directly in front of you. Imagine, you see something but are not able to recall its name, just take its picture and Google Goggles will do the rest for you! So what is this Google Goggles? It is an image recognition application used for searches based on pictures taken by handheld devices.

It is currently found in the Google Labs as a beta version. Google Goggles was developed for use on Google's Android operating systems for mobile devices. It is currently available for Android devices running on Android 1.6 and above and as it requires an auto focusing camera it is available for iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 devices running IOS4 or above.

As it is still a lab product it works well for things such as pictures of books, landmarks, products, logos, texts, artworks, barcodes and few others but is currently unable to distinguish clearly among pictures of animals, plants food, apparels etc. However, Google promises to make the system capable of recognizing different plants and leaves in near future so that it might be useful not only for curious users but for environmentalists as well.

At this stage Google Goggles provides many useful applications to the users for example the barcode can be used to search for similar products or prices and these codes can be even saved for future reference. It also has an exciting ability to translate a text snippet to some other language. All you need to do is to just aim your phone camera at it, run the application and wait for few seconds. Currently it supports five different languages — English, French, Italian, German and Spanish.

Google Goggles for iPhone isn't a separate application, instead it is built into the Google Mobile App for iPhone. On 5 October 2010 Google had announced the availability of Google Goggles application for iPhone devices, that comes with iOS4. Google has confirmed that in near future it will reach other platforms too and thus its use will not be affected by a user’s choice of platform. Goggles which in  Google’s terms is “computer vision” looks quite impressive and perhaps is all set to provide a new dimension to user’s search.

Check out the cool video of Google Goggles -