Google’s Pittman Talks About Visual Search & Facial Recognition Capabilities

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 […]

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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:


About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a technologist and a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics.

In 2019, Barry was awarded the Outstanding Community Services Award from Search Engine Land, in 2018 he was awarded the US Search Awards the "US Search Personality Of The Year," you can learn more over here and in 2023 he was listed as a top 50 most influential PPCer by Marketing O'Clock.

Barry can be followed on X here and you can learn more about Barry Schwartz over here or on his personal site.

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