Google has fulfilled its promise and has just released Google Goggles , the visual search application for Android devices. This announcement was made by the search engine giants during the launch event at Computer History Museum. In simple words, Google Goggles lets you search by providing images instead of words as your search query. (Video included at the end of the post)

googlegoggles

The app, which is in Google Labs, is currently available for download from the Android market and runs on all mobile devices that are running on  Android 1.6 or a higher OS.

Currently, Goggles can only recognize books & DVDs, landmarks, logos, contact info, artwork, businesses, products, barcodes, or text.

To search for a business location, you don’t even need to capture the image. Just point your camera to the business spot and the app will automatically display the name of the pointed location. Tap the name to learn more about your searched result.

How to use the app

  1. Start Google Goggles from your Android phone.
  2. Capture an image of the object you want to search.
  3. The app will analyze the object and return the results.

The app actually goes about searching your image based on the following steps (algorithm)

  • Send the user’s image to Google’s datacenters.
  • Create signatures of objects in the image using computer vision algorithms.
  • Compare signatures against all other known items in our image recognition databases.
  • Figure out how many matches exist.
  • Return one or more search results, based on available meta data and ranking signals.
  • All of this in just a few seconds.