Google Integrates Visual Search Into Mobile App For iPhone

Google Goggles is an imperfect but promising technology that allows users to search with their cameras instead of their keyboards. It’s a kind of parallel world to voice search. Both of these technologies attempt to make it much easier for users to use search on mobile devices and avoid having to manually key in text queries.

As an aside Google’s recent acquisition of BlindType is part of this larger project to make search on mobile devices more user friendly.

Google has now incorporated Goggles into its general Google iPhone app. A new camera icon enables Goggles (like the mic button enables voice search):

In the new version of Google Mobile App just tap on the camera button to search using Goggles. Goggles will analyze the image and highlight the objects it recognizes — just click on them to find out more.

This is starting on the iPhone and quickly move into the other app stores.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezc108DTaug&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

In my experience Goggles is more promising than practical. Google’s recent acquisition of Plink, however, indicates Google’s commitment to visual search and should result in improvements in the relatively near future.