Google Goggles is a visual search app for Android phones. Instead of using words, take a picture of an object with your camera phone: we attempt to recognize the object, and return relevant search results. Goggles also provides information about businesses near you by displaying their names directly in the camera preview.
Google is tapping into the growing popularity of social networking by integrating tweets and Facebook updates into its search results, as it enables users to screen for the web’s freshest content.
The new feature, launched Monday, is called “real-time search” and allows results to be sorted by when they were posted online, which puts more emphasis on new content such as news articles, blog postings and Wikipedia updates.
Updates on social networking sites will only make their way into search results if Facebook users, for example, have flagged their profiles as public, Google said The search engine also made announcements about how it hopes to further entrench itself in the mobile search world with features that will do away with the need to type in a query.
A team of Canadian Google employees, out of the company’s Waterloo, Ont., office had a hand in creating the new Google Goggles feature, which allows users to take a photo with their mobile phone and use it as a search entry.
Google is also tailoring its search results on mobile phones to take into account where a user is located.
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