Google Goggles good for places, not faces

Have you ever been in a situation where you saw a landmark and wanted to look it up online but didn’t know its name?

Artwork, a landmark, a company logo – all of these can be found through Google’s latest image-searching software.

According to CNN, Google announced Monday the creation of Google Goggles, which could transform the way we search on the Web. The new product enables people to make searches by using a photograph taken by a mobile phone. Read full CNN article here.

Vic Gundotra, Google’s vice president of engineering, said the new search ability has a database of billions of pictures that finds a match to the photograph taken and provides information on the photo’s subject. The Goggles can find book covers, artwork, album covers, logos, locations and landmarks.

“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.”

First, Google ran searches by text. Then, it ran searches by voice recognition. With this picture search method of finding data, Google would most certainly beat out other search engine companies and make mobile phones more like computers.

Despite Google’s big announcement of the product, the public will not be getting its hands on the Google Goggles just yet. It is still being worked on in Google Labs for “nascent nature of computer vision” among other issues.

“Google Goggles works well on certain types of objects in certain categories,” Gundotra said.

Google made the announcement at a Computer History Museum event and demonstrated how the Goggles and voice recognition searches work.

“It could be we are really at the cusp of an entirely new computing era,” Gundotra said, with “devices that can understand our own speech, help us understand others, and augment our own sight by helping us see further.”

Gundotra is right. This is a new era – an era where Google is virtually unstoppable in its amazing advances in technology. Every possible physical sense can be used to find items on the Internet. Taste and smell capabilities would be improbable and far too strange to behold.

People traveling in foreign countries won’t need a tour guide or a translator; they can pull out their camera phones, snap a picture and find explanations to everything they see. Plus, it is faster to take a photograph than track down someone who may not have all the knowledge of the subject of the picture and may not speak English.

The CNN article said face recognition is possible in Google Goggles. Faces are included in the billions of images stored in the picture database. However, developers do not want to focus on creating that feature yet. Nor should they – it would be a dangerous move.

“We still want to work on the issues of user opt-in and control,” Gundotra said. “We have the technology to do the underlying face recognition, but we decided to delay that until safeguards are in place.”

Having face recognition in a Google search for people who are not public figures would be an invasion of privacy. People today are already paranoid about identity theft and stalkers thanks to the elusive ways of the Internet. People would start to question one’s motive in using face recognition. Sure, it might come in handy to identify that cute guy you always see at the gym and make sure he’s not a wanted felon, but there might be people with malicious intentions.

On the other hand, for private individuals who want to keep their lives private and out of the public’s view, face recognition would do away with that. It also makes one wonder how much information would pop up on a face search. Any information would be too much information. Phone numbers, addresses, birthdays – that information combined with one’s picture out there for anyone to access is a frightening thought.

Another issue that comes to mind is how Google got the pictures in the first place. Would they get permission first or would they steal the photos from Web sites? What kind of “safeguards” would Google have to set up?

It’s probably for the best to keep on eye on the Google Goggles for the time being and see whether it will be more helpful or harmful.