Google Goggles Boggles The Mind

The Internet, by most experts, is still considered to be in its infancy. For the average user, this might seem a ludicrous claim. Users are so dependent on the Internet in today's world that we can almost see the catastrophe that will happen if for some reason the Internet ceases to exist. In fact, with most banks, government organizations, and loads of other basic utility companies offering services on the Internet, it indeed makes one wonder how people can consider this mammoth network to be in its infancy.

However, the fact remains that the Internet is indeed in its infancy, and the true potential of the Internet can be downright scary. With movies like Enemy of the State and Eagle Eye giving us a glimpse of the power of the Internet, it can easily be seen how much the technology can develop.

Bringing the world of Hollywood to the everyday user is something what Google, the world's largest search engine, and the most popular site on the Internet, had attempted to do. Till date, users who wanted to search for content on the Internet had to open a search engine and type what they wanted to search for in a search box. While this was what typically most search engines offered, Google went a step further introducing voice search, and phone queries. However, in its latest attempt to make life easier for the users of the Internet, Google is attempting to do something remarkable.

They have developed a program that lets you search using images as the search term. Users can simply upload a photo and get all information regarding that image, if it exists in the Google database. Of course, that might not mean every image, but with a database of almost 8 billion images, Google's 'Goggles', as the program is called, can identify most books, places, logos, popular landmarks and more.

Google's VP of engineering, Vic Gundotra claims that Google is trying to make a database such that any image users upload can be identified by them. "It is our goal to be able to identify any image," he said. "It represents our earliest efforts in the field of computer vision. You can take a picture of an item, use that picture of whatever you take as the query."

This amazing project is still in Google labs, as of course, there are quite a bit of limitations yet to be overcome. The program does not recognize all photos, and work will have to be done on that aspect. Also, face recognition is not present, so uploading pictures of people will not give you any results. While the technology for face recognition is present, Google decided not to include this feature in their program for security reasons, saying "We have the technology to do the underlying face recognition, but we decided to delay that until safeguards are in place." And of course, the more popular the item in question is, the easier it is for Google Goggles to recognize it. This again needs to be worked on. So, this might be still some time away from average users.

But, all said and done, the product works, and works wonderfully well at that. Google Goggles will definitely turn out to be the next big thing, not only in the computer world, but in an average person's everyday life as well. The product was demonstrated using real world examples using a mobile phone and performed exceptionally well.

With this new program, Google has just cemented its authority on the web as the number one search engine. Not that it needed to do that, but thanks to the innovative people at the Google Labs, searching the vast Internet will become much much easier. With this new feature, being referred to as search by sight, Google has given the saying "A picture is worth a thousand words" a literal meaning.