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Google Visual Search Coming Soon to Android

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the my-donut-shop-returned-goatse dept.

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.

10 of 111 comments (clear)

  1. Great Idea, but... by Reason58 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Great Idea, but... by SparkEE · · Score: 5, Insightful

      In the video, a user takes a picture of the sign at Santa Monica Pier and gets a search result. Seems like it would be practical and quicker to have location based information available. Right now I can open up Google maps, hit "My Location", Tap on the building for Santa Monica Pier, and I get it's address. They should just add an option there to do a search. No camera needed, which also means it will work at night.

  2. Re:Just one word for you, son--"porn" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The trouble is, you'd need a source image to start with!

  3. Re:Now they'll know what you've seen. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    One man's -1 Troll is another's +5 funny/insightful.

  4. AI needed? by Ed+Avis · · Score: 1, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:AI needed? by amicusNYCL · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Do you suppose that there is a database containing the physical locations of all objects? How exactly would you use a GPS and orientation information to figure out which object a person is taking a picture of, a car for example?

      --
      "Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
  5. Searching for porn will be no fun. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    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.

  6. Re:First step... by inviolet · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

    Yep yep. There's a dark side, though. This will completely change the game regarding the (currently) presumed anonymity of photographs. Today it is impossible to take somebody's photo and then search for all matching photos on the internet, and so people do not much mind having their photos taken. Photo search will turn that on its head -- and the internet has a lonnnnnnng memory...

    (And then we'll have "automatic aging" algorithms that can find photos of them while they were back in college partying.)

    --
    FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
  7. Re:Just one word for you, son--"porn" by Ephemeriis · · Score: 2, Insightful

    ..and the chance of them getting working A.I. to handle the suggested visual recognition task reasonably well is so small that it also boggles the mind.

    Since when do you need AI?

    There's already plenty of machine vision software out there... Hell, my crappy digital camera is able to recognize a face well enough to tell if somebody blinked. All it has to do is match the image you just took to another image in its database with some degree of accuracy.

    Then it can use the tags on the similar image to look things up... Or the words surrounding that similar image on the web...

    --
    "Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
  8. Re:Why don't they focus on things that matter? by poetmatt · · Score: 2, Insightful

    cyanogenmod takes you about 5 minutes.

    install addon via code.google.com that lets you flash it.
    download update flash, backup existing memory.
    reboot into cyanogenmod.

    done, only further step is if you intend to format the memory card for ext3 so that you can store as many apps as you want. Also probably takes 10+minutes to download cyanogenmod. Yes, it is the solution and unlike apple, you're not going to be behind on updates or bricked due to flashing.

    The bigger pain is when you have a million apps, you have a million updates.

    Flash won't be gone immediately with HTML5, but it hopefully will be soon. Flash is horribly inefficient and runs like crap, and basically doesn't do plenty of things HTML5 does. So soon, flash will thankfully be gone.