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Last year, Google Drive added an advanced image search feature powered by Goggles that recognizes objects and uses OCR technology to extract text. The same feature is now available in Google+: search for [sunflower], click "More", restrict the results to "Photos" and select "Most recent". You'll find sunflower images from Google+ posts that don't even include "sunflower", not even in the image filename.


This also works for the images you've uploaded to Picasa Web Albums/Google+ Photos or the images uploaded by your circles.



{ via Android Police }

Google Drive has the most powerful image search technology you can find in an online storage service. It uses Google Goggles technology to recognize objects, logos, landmarks, text and much more, so you can find an image even if the filename is a.jpg. The most impressive thing is that the processing happens as soon as you upload the images and there's no setting to enable.

For example, Google Drive found an image of the Android statue from the Googleplex when searching for [Android].


It also found a screenshot of Google's homepage and a Chrome logo when searching for [Google], this time using OCR technology.


"Let's say you upload a scanned image of an old newspaper clipping. You can search for a word from the text of the actual article. We also use image recognition so that if you drag and drop photos from your Grand Canyon trip into Drive, you can later search for [grand canyon] and photos of its gorges should pop up. This technology is still in its early stages, and we expect it to get better over time," explains Google.

Google Goggles for Android has a new mode that lets you find information about objects without manually taking pictures. Just enable the continuous mode and Goggles will automatically analyze the scene, upload the photos to Google's servers and show the results at the bottom of the screen. "Continuous mode is a quick and easy new way to use Goggles. You can now get results instantly without having to take a picture - no shutter press required! Goggles will scan the scene continuously so you don't need to worry about taking multiple pictures. The new continuous mode works best with books, products, artwork, and landmarks," explains Google. For now, Goggles can't detect text in the continuous mode, so you need to switch to the snapshot mode to translate a text, find an address or call a phone number.


The "live" mode is useful if you want to scan many barcodes or if you want to find information about many objects without spending a lot of time taking the perfect photos. Goggles is still far from perfect, so it will sometimes detect a lot of incorrect objects. You'll need a fast Internet connection, good lighting and an Android phone with a decent camera. Unfortunately, the application doesn't save its findings. While it's obvious that cluttering the history is not a good idea, saving the list of detected objects to a temporary page would be really useful.

Google Goggles 1.7 also adds a feature that returns pages which include the text you've scanned, even if it's a long text. This is especially useful for news articles. Now you can quickly find the online version of the content you're reading.


You can improve Goggles by adding information about the objects you know. Tap "can you suggest a better result?", draw a box around the object and describe the object. "To date, hundreds of thousands of submissions have been made to improve Goggles. Starting today, if you choose to suggest a better result or submit a new object altogether, your suggestion could become a result for the next user who searches for a similar object with Goggles," informs Google.

If you have a device that runs Android Gingerbread, Honeycomb or Ice Cream Sandwich, install Goggles from the Android Market or update to the latest version. According to Google, about 50.6% of the Android devices run Gingerbread and 2.4% of the devices run Android Honeycomb.