Beet.TV interviewed R.J. Pittman, Google’s Director of Product Management for Consumer Search Properties, about image search. The video is below, but here is my short summary of the interview.

Pittman said Image Search has huge growth opportunity for Google. Google explained that text doesn’t always describe the image, so they use other techniques. They use image processing, computer vision, and visual search (understanding something about the pixels in the picture). Visual search is something they are really excited about, including facial recognition. For example, imagine uploading your friend’s picture to Google and it will find matches of images across the web to that face. Google is also exploring “scene analysis,” identifying objects outside of people in a picture, such as chairs or even landmarks. Finally, Pittman talks about GPS technologies built into many phones, which is used in Google’s Panaramio. So you can also search by city or region.

Here is the full interview as a video:

Related Topics: Google: Images | Search Engines: Photo & Image Search

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz