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Google Visual Search Coming Soon to Android
Several sources have shared the news that "Google Goggles," publicly known as Google Visual Search, will be "coming soon" to an Android phone near you. Rather than typing in the search term, you will be able to just take a picture with your phone and search results will be returned. The new search was recently featured on CNBC's "Inside the Mind of Google." Unfortunately Goggles didn't pass muster with a recent focus group, so it could be a while before Google decides this is ready to hit the streets.
The possibilities here are so boundless that it simply boggles the mind.
This ain't rocket surgery.
Now Google will not only know all of your searches and all of the emails you've sent out, but in addition to the GPS tracking of most modern mobile phones they'll even know what you've seen.
Just wait until you take a picture of your girlfriend's asshole with your mobile, and soon you'll be finding out all of the filthy porn she did several years back in college. You'll be seeing her arse penetrated by all sorts of objects and random foreign men.
Image searching combined with the fantastically bad cameras on all smart phones. Sounds like a good idea in theory, but not so great in practice. For now.
I'm sure they'll have plenty of time to work out the kinks during Beta.
So, the Goggles... they do nothing?
My first thought was this TED video: http://blog.ted.com/2009/03/sixth_sense_demo.php. It would be interesting to have a heavyweight like Google developing tools to bring such a product to consumers.
My webcomic
What are the odds that the service doesn't use the image at all, but just uses the phone's GPS sensor, compass, and orientation sensor to work out what object you're looking at?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
I wonder why folks at Android (read Google) do not focus on web functionalities that matter in today's age.
Heck, we need Flash and PDF capabilities by default. Yes...by default. I know there are apps for these but "default" is the key word here. Now what's wrong with that?
Secondly how come Google's own Google Maps works better on the iPhone than Android phones? It should be the other way round...after all it's their product.
Come on Google do something.
On my next date, she whips out her cell phone camera, snaps a quick shot, shoots it off to Google, and gets results on me.
"Honey, that chicken is a filthy liar! She so wanted it at the time!"
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
First you need a naked woman to see more naked woman.
And if you take a picture of your cock, you will get pictures of more cocks.
This is the First step. Next as soon as we see an item, our brain will be bombarded with price list from different web stores and we will know where to buy it cheap. Think of a Java code, it will be in your brain along with some not so disruptive ads.
Thanks it is Google who are working on it. If it were MS, Ballmer would have squirted a lot more than necessary.
The Amazon app for Android offers the ability to search for an item by either barcode or photo. According to the Amazon blurb, there are real people behind the requests that actually look for the items pictured and send results. I have used it twice and both times they found what I needed, but the results took about 10-15 minutes to get to me. I wonder if Google will just have 10,000 wage slaves working the results queue?
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Might as well add a video search feature as well! The only thing I would be worried about is the privacy part of things. So would these pictures I take a snapshot of be stored in a server cache computer?
Google Goggles is available for install from the Android Market place right now.
It works great for logos, and can even OCR business cards. Though, it seems to be a tad crashy on the Droid.
Great... now we will have a search function that only works in 24.5 days intervals
Google has stated publicly in the past, that their goal is to "know more about you than you do." Cell phone camera search, is one more tool in their toolbox for achieving that end, and it's one more service of theirs I won't be useing.
This would essentially, turn the entire cell phone camera crazed searching public, into a giant information gathering army, to further googles purposes. No matter how much they say its about you, its not about you, its about them. Thats why its a "free service".
Go ahead, take snapshots of everyone and everything you own. Let google organize it into the worlds largest database of information. Pictures of your kids, your wife, face scanned, body dimension analyzed, cataloged, available upon request ( for a fee ) by law enforcement agencies, corrupt governments, power hungry dictators, and any other 'quasi-legitamite investigative body' worldwide.
Google is big brother.
As for me, i'm using Ecosia. They destroy their records in 48 hours, and are buying up rainforest before googles corporate customers destroy it all.
ps. No, I'm not an anti-technology "omg John Kennedy Jr. orchestrated 9/11 from the dead" conspiracy nut. I am a computer programmer who is aware of multiple algorithms that are probably in use, that google doesnt speak about.
Android enabled "smart" phone ... $200.
Cell phone service ... $50 per month
Giving every minute detail about your entire life, the GPS location of your wife smoking weed at the Christmas party, the co-ordinates of the shiny new car you just waxed, and images of your kids to a "for profit" entity that serves its own purposes ( and any government that exercises any influence over them ) voluntarily .... priceless
If I want to search for information about horses, I could walk outside, take a picture of one, upload it to my PC, and hope that Google recognise it as a horse!
Which is much more fun than typing in H-O-R-S-E !
Snap a picture of a douchebag that just cut you off in some line and see who he is , where he lives... doesn't sound too far-fetched really.
Google Goggles is available on Android as of yesterday. See the official Google video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hhgfz0zPmH4
It's not coming soon, it's already there. I downloaded and installed the app, it's an OCR that can also read logos and barcodes. If you take a photo of a product with text, logos or barcodes it will know what that product is.
I took a photo of a tape dispenser with nothing but the table in background, it wasn't able to figure out it is a photo of a tape dispenser, it gave me a list of similar photos which had nothing at all to do with tape dispenser, there was even a photo of a swan.
I took a photo of a memory stick, it wasn't able to figure out what this is. Once again I got the "similar pictures" one of them was a photo of bees, nothing even close to memory stick.
I took a photo of the hand sanitizer, it recognized the Purell logo and read the text on the bottle. Taking a photo of the back of the bottle didn't result in any meaningful matches. Taking a photo of the bar code identified the product, but that's something I can already do with the barcode reader application.
It can read QR barcodes too. Nothing special, the barcode reader app already does that.
Well, I guess Google is kinda late...
Here. You can test it right now:
http://betalabs.nokia.com/betas/view/nokia-point-and-find
It’s sad, how often Slashdot is full of hype about Google or Apple doing things, that others did for a loong time. :/
Must be sad to live the 3rd world of the mobile phone industry.
It’s really hard not to do a “shameless plug” for Nokia phones yet again...
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I have this software running on my phone, and it does work.
What stuns me is that while this thing is in 'beta' and returning poor search results, they have the opportunity to 'train up' the AI, while also keeping hold of a bevy of images that they collect from a few thousand (or hundred thousand) phones that geeks like us were willing to install it on...
I bet that the corpus of images they collect during the next 4 years - the beta period - will be pretty impressive, and kind of scary. I bet that they claim rights on all of them. I guess we need to start watermarking the photos from our phonecams.
Just my thoughts...
bar codes are your friend. as are product codes and other text that may be scanned.
Inventor, Artist http://www.Rubber-Power.com
I've installed Google Goggles and gave it a test run. It works brilliantly. I haven't tried any landmarks yet, but I took a picture of a textbook sitting on my desk and it recognised it and took me to book reviews, and I could preview the book on Google Books. The picture had major glare issues and it still worked fine. Thinking it was a fluke, I took a picture of a second textbook and sure enough it worked perfectly again. 2 from 2 aint bad.
Great, now searches for "human" will return everyone with a picture on the net.
You connect the dots, you pick up the pieces.