Google starts visual search for mobile devices and realtime search

Communiqué de presse
New Search Functions: Google starts visual search for mobile
devices and realtime search in the internet
Zurich, December 7, 2009 – Google was founded as a search company, and we
continue to dedicate more time and energy to search than anything else we do. Today at
an event in California, Google announced some innovative new additions to the search
family:
Google Goggles (Labs) is a new visual search application for Android devices that
allows you to search with a picture instead of words. When you take a picture of an
object with the camera on your phone, we attempt to recognize the item, and return
relevant search results. Have you ever seen a photo of a beautiful place and wanted to
know where it is? Or stumbled across something in the newspaper and wanted to learn
more? Have you ever wanted more information about a landmark you’re visiting? Or
wanted to store the contact details from a business card while you’re on the go?
Goggles can help with all of these, and more.
Google Goggles works by attempting to match portions of a picture against our corpus
of images. When a match is found, we return search terms that are relevant to the
matched image. Goggles currently recognizes tens of millions of objects, including
places, famous works of art, and logos. For places, you don't even need to take a
picture. Just open Google Goggles and hold your phone in front of the place you're
interested in, then using the device’s GPS and compass, Goggles will recognise what
that place is and display its name on the camera viewfinder. You can then tap the
business name to get more info on it.
“Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words,” said Shailesh Nalawadi, the
product manager for Google Goggles. “For many search queries, using an image to
search is easier and more useful than text alone, especially on a mobile. Computer
vision technology is still in its infancy, but Goggles demonstrates its potential. We are
hard at work extending our recognition capabilities. You can imagine a future where
visual searching is as natural as pointing your finger.”
Google Goggles is available as a free downloadable application in Android Market. It is
currently available in English around the world. In addition to Goggles, Google
announced the addition of “Latest results” to searches in English on Google.com. This
new feature brings search results to life with a dynamic stream of real-time content from
across the web. Now, immediately after conducting a search, you'll be able to see live
updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and Friendfeed, as well as headlines
from news and blog posts that have been published seconds ago. All of these updates
are ranked to show the freshest, most relevant results related to what you're looking for.
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Communiqué de presse
A propos de Google Inc.
Les technologies de recherche innovantes de Google permettent l’accès quotidien aux informations à des
millions de personnes dans le monde. Fondée en 1998 par Larry Page et Sergey Brin, doctorants à Stanford,
Google est devenue en quelques années un leader dans le monde d'Internet sur tous les grands marchés
internationaux. L’offre publicitaire ciblée de Google procure aux entreprises de toutes tailles des résultats
mesurables, tout en améliorant le confort d'utilisation des internautes. Google, dont le siège se trouve dans la
Silicon Valley, possède des bureaux dans toute l’Europe, l'Amérique et l’Asie.
Contact Google:
Google Switzerland S.à r.l.
Matthias Meyer
Corporate Communications & Public Affairs
Brandschenkestrasse 110
8002 Zurich
Tél.: 044 668 13 62
E-mail: [email protected]
Internet: www.google.ch
Contact pour la presse en Suisse:
L&W Communication AG
Evelyn von Wieser
Direction
Schulhausstrasse 12
8002 Zurich
Tél.: 044 389 22 22 / Fax 044 389 22 20
E-mail: [email protected]
Internet: www.lw-com.com
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