Google goes visual with sci-fi-like Search by Image
Search by Image breaks down source image into little blocks matched against Google’s vast content database
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could simply ask Google to analyze an image and return relevant results? Recently, I’ve been discussing this with my beer friends and we came away wishing a feature like that sooner than later. Before any of us could have dreamed of, however, Google at a San Francisco presser this morning took search to the next level with a science-fiction like enhancement. They call it Search by Image and that’s exactly what it does.
You simply drag an image and drop it on the search box to get matching results, just as if you manually typed in your query. Tapping Google’s advanced image recognition back-end, Search by Image works – and this is the cool bit – with offline images that Google has never touched and doesn’t have in its index.
On-stage demos were pretty impressive. One example included dropping a scenery image on the browser’s window, which returned a list of locations Google thought accurately represented what’s on the photo. Similarly dropping a logo returns the name of the associated company. There’s more…
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t99BfDnBZcI&w=670&h=411]