Google Goggles Gets Upgrade On Android Devices

Google has announced a trio of updates to Goggles, its visual search tool that analyzes mobile photos and provides (hopefully) matching search results/information about the image.

Since the search results don’t always match the image — “visual recognition is still a complicated task,” Google’s blog post explains — one of the upgrades involves a way for users to basically “tag” or explain the image that Goggles couldn’t figure out. There’s a new link on the results page that says, “Can you suggest a better result?” and it leads to this interface for describing the image and sending the info to Google.

One of the other new features is tool that lets users append notes to images and have the notes saved in their search history. The notes are searchable, but are not sent when sharing a result with friends.

The third upgrade involves what Google describes as “quicker and easier” business card recognition. When photographing a business card, Goggles recognizes the content as a specific type of text and lets users easily add the person to the phone’s contact list.

All of these upgrades affect Goggles 1.4 on Android devices.