Personally, I was pretty impressed the other day when someone showed me search via voice-recognition on their iPhone. I was already feeling bad about not being up on the latest breakthrough in search technology when, to make matters worse, Google announces another whole new way to search.

It’s the new Google Goggles feature, and with it a user can snap a photo, and then run a search using only the visual data in the photo. So if you’re staring at a painting in an art gallery and want to know all about it, just take a picture of it. If it happens to be one of the more than one billion images already in the database, then you’re in luck. Some of the other examples posted on the Google Goggles page are recognizing the label on a wine bottle, a corporate logo, a restaurant, or the cover of a book. Handy stuff for sure, though they don’t really begin to explore the eventual possibilities for a technology like this.

The big one will, one day, be facial recognition. Google already has a database with more than a billion images. What’s a few billion more, say, one for every person on earth? Of course that’s a few years down the road, but the possibilites are staggering. For their part, Google has already addressed the issue, with their vice president of engineering, Vic Gundotra, saying: “For this product, we made the decision not to do facial recognition… We still want to work on the issues of user opt-in and control. We have the technology to do the underlying face recognition, but we decided to delay that until safeguards are in place.”

And there’s the kicker. There are immense privacy issues around having anyone instantly able to access your personal information just by snapping a photo of you. But given that the technology is already so close at hand, it’s only a matter of time before this type of thing becomes a reality.

But back to present-day reality… Right now, Google Goggles is only available on Android phones, and only in a beta version. They have promised, though, that it will soon be available as an iPhone app as well.

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