Google Goggles

I was bored a day or so ago and downloaded Google Goggles from the Android Market (the newer and poor cousin of Apple's App Store) for my phone.

The program - I don't like the word "app" or application, both of which have replaced program; but, I suppose that's another post - is pre-Beta, what Google puts in its "Labs":

http://www.googlelabs.com/

Most of its stuff starts out there.

"Google Goggles lets you search Google using pictures from your camera phones. We take an image as input, and using several image recognition backends (object recognition, OCR, face matching, etc), we return relevant search results."

Maybe someday.

I've taken a picture of a wood chair, it gave me ten or so images, including a pool table. I took a picture of a glass that had the logo "KENO" on it and again got ten or so totally unrelated results.

I took a picture of my monitor with no results. I decided to give it some help and did a close up of the bottom band of the monitor which spells out "DELL." The results were varied. The first time it gave me links related to Iphones; the second time with a little less of the screen in the picture, it gave me eBay results for "egadget" whatever that is.

Next, I tried a painting of the clubhouse at Augusta National Golf Club. Google isn't a golfer. My results were mostly pictures of beaches with a picture of a Wrangler jeans logo tattoo thrown in for humor I suppose.

I'd say they've got a bit more development ahead of them.