Google unleashes better ways to find photos, and results that show data as its updated.
Some days, I feel sorry, for Bing. Its a decent search engine and I do use it, but it can’t compete with the kinds of innovations in search unleashed at Google. This week Google tackled two of the most difficult search problems, searching by images (a project called Goggles) and finding data in real time, as it is being updated.
As for Goggles, this is beyond cool. Google lets you take a photo with your Android phone, send the photo to Google who then identifies it against its vast store of indexed information and offers info about it. Its a bit like augmented reality only it works with many of the objects that Google has already indexed and has somehow labeled as identifiable. Better still, it can figure out what kind of data you are capturing and let you manipulate it in obvious ways. You snap a picture of a business card, a book, a landmark building, upload it to Google and Google will then let you do various tasks. If its a book cover, Google finds info on the book so you can purchase it. If its a landmark, Google fetches mapping or other info about the building. If its a business card, Google converts it to text, parses it and let’s you add it to your contact database.
How doe it work, and how well? Well according to this review from Computerworld, the results are mixed.
“As soon as my partner and I heard about Goggles, we immediately grabbed our Droids , installed the app and started clicking away at business cards, books and barcodes. Results were mixed, depending on what we were aiming at. Goggles did pretty well on books, identifying most, but not all, of the covers we tested it with. … when Goggles did recognize a book, it offered links to price comparisons and previews of the book at Google Book Search; it also showed Web search results. … Results were more mixed when we tried it on business cards. While it did well on one or two extremely simple cards, for the most part, Goggles wasn’t terribly efficient. … on the whole, [it[ did a far worse job than most current business-card scanners I’ve tried.”
Reviewers said that Goggles did best with landmarks when used with Google Latitude, which geo-locates your phone and puts it on Google Maps. Those little tags often showed up on Google maps for businesses on the street. If they did, Google offered a relevant search about the restaurant or business, and related topics. If it didn’t, then Goggle didn’t do a good job offering relevant search data on the building pictured.
For cool factor, Goggles scores high, but lots of things can be cool and not work really well. We’ll see if this one rises in accuracy.
In the meantime, if you need to know what’s on the Web this very minute, Google is trying to do that by offering realtime search results, as does Bing. Both search engines recently added realtime Twitter results to their search engine, but Google has now added blogs and news sites as well. When I entered “Afghanistan” the results scrolled for a while and then stalled out, until I refreshed the page. I tried numous other generic terms, and they all had realtime results as well.
That’s a nice feature that will keep Google lovers happy with their search engine of choice for a while.
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