Sunday, August 1, 2010

Google search is getting eyes and ears, moving beyond typed key words to let people scour the internet with mobile telephone cameras or spoken words in multiple languages.

Google has unveiled ‘Goggles’ software that lets people search online using pictures taken with cameras in mobile phones based on its Android operating system.

“When you take a mobile phone camera and connect it to the internet, it becomes an eye,” Google mobile search vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra said while demonstrating Goggles in the US.

“Google Goggles lets you take a picture of an item and use the picture as the query.”

An experimental version of Goggles will be available for people at Google Labs web site. Goggles already recognises books, wine labels, CD covers, landmarks and more, according to Gundotra.

He demonstrated by taking a picture of a wine bottle label with a smart phone and almost instantly getting reviews, pictures and other internet data about the vintage in a Google search results web page.

“It is our goal to visually identify any image,” Gundotra said.

“It is in Google Labs because of the nascent nature of computer vision.

In the future, you will be able to point [a camera phone] and we will be able to treat it as a mouse pointer for the real world.”

Google has also started adding real time results to its internet search engine, channeling feeds from Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and other fresh content into responses to queries.

“Users will get results on results page as they are being produced out there,” Google fellow Amit Singhal said.

“This is the first time ever that a search engine has integrated the real time web into the results page.”

Twitter messages and other fresh content streamed into a box on Google’s main search page in a demonstration of the new feature, which will be rolled out at all English-language search sites in the coming days.

Google is planning to incorporate real time search in other langu-ages beginning early next year, according to Singhal.

Social-networking rivals MySpace and facebook will be providing feeds of all public updates.

“MySpace and facebook users can decide what they want to see offered at Google,” said Google vice president of search products and user experience Marissa Mayer.

Google is working on a standard software interface facebook and MySpace can use to stream updates to the internet search titan in real time.

Twitter feeds were in Google real-time results yesterday, but facebook and MySpace updates will not be integrated until possibly as late as February of next year, according to Mayer.

“I’m super-excited that we are doing this,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said at the event.

“I’m so psyched. It’s the future, like ‘Star Trek’.”

Google will only display updates from facebook public pages, “fan pages” used by celebrities like Ashton Kutcher, athletes such as Lance Armstrong and other high-profile people interested in firing off text messages to large num-bers of followers.

MySpace will let all users permit online comments, pictures, video or other content created in profiles to be displayed in Google’s real time results, according to MySpace chief product officer Jason Hirschhorn.

“We look at this as an extension of their self expression,” Hirschhorn said. “We want people to hear their comments and opinions and what better way than to have them next to results on a Google search?”

No financial details, if any, were revealed by the internet firms.

Google is eager to have a platform in place to allow bloggers, social networks and other producers of real time online content to instantly route updates to the search engine.

An aspiration is to one day be able to personalise search so that Google blends public information with private updates individuals have access to in online social networks.

“That is something we are far away from,” Mayer said.

“But, in the end, you really hope that the search engines can search the web the way you see it. If you can see it, we should be able to search it. That is our goal.”

On Friday, Google began offering ‘Personalised Search’ to users worldwide in 40 languages.

“This addition enables us to customise search results for you based upon 180 days of search activity linked to an anonymous cookie in your browser,” Google engineer Bryan Horling and product manager Matthew Kulick said.

Google is also incorporating location into search, tailoring results to offerings and interests where people are when they access the internet.

Google’s voice-based search service, first rolled out about a year ago, has now added Japanese.

People can now speak Google search subjects into smart phones in English, Mandarin, or Japanese.

“In addition to voice search, Google has huge investments in translation,” Gundotra said. “Our goal at Google is nothing less than being able to search in all major languages of the world.”

The California internet colossus is aiming to deliver a translation service to mobile telephones some time in 2010.

People will be able to speak into a mobile telephone to have sent-ences translated into other languages and delivered back quickly in text and audio forms, Gundotra said.

He also showed a “near me now” feature that uses global positioning  to customise map results to show shops, attractions and restaurants that are in easy reach.

“In the future, there will be many different ways of searching,” said Mayer. “We really foresee a world where you can search and find your answer where ever it exists and whatever language it is in.”