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Search By Sight With Google Goggles

MG Siegler

2682404427_2a2375b013Today, at their Search Event in Mountain View, Google demoed a brand new product set to launch in Google Labs: Google Goggles. Humorous name aside, the product looks to be a huge leap forward in the field of visual search — by which I mean, you point a camera at something and Google figures out what it is.

The example that Google VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra showed on stage involved taking a picture of a particular bottle of wine. When he ran it through Google Goggles, the result showed that the particular bottle has a hint of apricots. You also be able to use Goggles to look up things such as CD covers and bar codes (this is likely similar to the popular Android app ShopSavvy). For text, Google Goggles uses optical character recognition (OCR) to try and read things like logos and labels to aid the search.

It seems as if this new functionality, which should be live in Google Labs soon, will be destined for Android phones at least at first.

Screen shot 2009-12-07 at 11.42.55 AM

Screen shot 2009-12-07 at 11.50.20 AM

Update: Google Goggles is now live in Labs. It will be Android-only for now, and it’s available in the Android market.

Here are some videos about the feature:

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hhgfz0zPmH4&w=640&h=385]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrE7yVJaA08&w=640&h=385]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzsAkh6kcdg&w=640&h=505]

Update 2: And here’s a live demo we got on video.

[photo: flickr/sakraft1]

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MG Siegler

M.G. Siegler is a general partner at Google Ventures, where he primarily focuses on early-stage investments. He has been deeply involved in the startup space since 2005, first as a web developer, then as a writer, and most recently as an investor and advisor. Having spent the past year in London helping to get Google Ventures’ European organization up and running, M.G. is now back in the Bay Area, working mainly out of Google Ventures’ San Francisco office. Before joining Google Ventures, M.G. was a founding partner of CrunchFund, an early-stage investment fund. Prior to that, he reported on the startup world as a writer for both TechCrunch and VentureBeat. M.G. still writes a column for TechCrunch on top of writing on his own sites and from time-to-time doing movie reviews in haiku. Originally from Ohio, M.G. graduated from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor before moving out west to work in Hollywood. One day, he will write that killer screenplay.

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