Google launches new search features for mobile and web users

Google was founded as a search company, and continue to dedicate more time and energy to search than anything else. Today at an event in California, Google announced some innovative new additions to the search family:

Google Goggles (Labs) is a new visual search application for Android devices that allows you to search with a picture instead of words. When you take a picture of an object with the camera on your phone, we attempt to recognize the item, and return relevant search results. Have you ever seen a photo of a beautiful place and wanted to know where it is? Or stumbled across something in the newspaper and wanted to learn more? Have you ever wanted more information about a landmark you’re visiting? Or wanted to store the contact details from a business card while you’re on the go? Goggles can help with all of these, and more.

Google Goggles works by attempting to match portions of a picture against our corpus of images. When a match is found, we return search terms that are relevant to the matched image. Goggles currently recognizes tens of millions of objects, including places, famous works of art, and logos. For places, you don't even need to take a picture. Just open Google Goggles and hold your phone in front of the place you're interested in, then using the device’s GPS and compass, Goggles will recognise what that place is and display its name on the camera viewfinder. You can then tap the business name to get more info on it.

“Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words,” said Shailesh Nalawadi, the product manager for Google Goggles. “For many search queries, using an image to search is easier and more useful than text alone, especially on a mobile. Computer vision technology is still in its infancy, but Goggles demonstrates its potential. We are hard at work extending our recognition capabilities. You can imagine a future where visual searching is as natural as pointing your finger.”

Google Goggles is available as a free downloadable application in Android Market. It is currently available in English around the world.

In addition to Goggles, Google announced the addition of “Latest results” to searches in English on Google.com. This new feature brings search results to life with a dynamic stream of real-time content from across the web. Now, immediately after conducting a search, you'll be able to see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and Friendfeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts that have been published seconds ago. All of these updates are ranked to show the freshest, most relevant results related to what you're looking for.