Introduction
Since 1993, search engines were developed by various groups and individuals around the world. The significance of the search engines to the World Wide Web was one of the most critical factors of Personal Computer development and Web itself. What Search engines brought in to the web was the accessibility. Search engines enabled people to search and receive information that were in form of web pages, images, or other types of information. Then the words “information highway” or “sea of information” was created.
The various different search engines tried different algorithms to give higher accuracy of search reference. The greatest impact was given by Google. Google introduced a slightly different format yet innovative search engine. “While conventional search engines ranked results by counting how many times the search terms appeared on the page, google theorized about a better system that analyzed the relationships between the websites. It was called PageRank, where a website’s relevance was determined by the number of pages, and the importance of the pages, that linked back to the original website”. Google was successful and are the leader of the search engine nowadays. Furthermore, Google is not stopping there. Google is generating various internet based services and products. Within their new products, they have now introduced a new medium of searching. It is the “Google Goggles”, name of Google’s image recognition system.
Here, I will be introducing this system and show how it is working out these days. Moreover, I would give my view of their future impact to some issues.
What is Google Goggles:
Google Goggles is “downloadable image recognition application created by Google. It is used for searches based on pictures taken by handheld devices. For example, taking a picture of a famous landmark would search for information about it, or taking a picture of a product’s barcode will search for information on the product”.
Google Goggles simply used the existing machine learning and image recognition technologies. With their searching algorithms and technologies, the image recognition system could bring out synergy. Google Goggles is intended to search almost anything by the picture given. Although the system is good in only certain pictures (like Text, Landmarks, Books, Contact Info, Artwork, Wine, Logos), they will probably bring out higher accuracy of search later.
Impact of Google Goggles:
The following are both impacts and my imagination about Google Goggles.
- Searching: The direct impact of Google Goggles is of course the searching. With their smart phones, they could take picture of text, landmarks, books, contact info, artwork, wine, or logos and receive relevant results of various medium of information.
- Advertisements: Another notable impact is Ads. Google is famous for providing a new way of advertisements and Google Goggles did come up with a new method as well. For example, taking a picture of a movie poster with Goggles automatically plays the movie trailer. This may develop the advertising market in a different way. The image advertisement can become a movie with sound enabled advertisements and 2D advertising sources may become 3D advertisements if 3D screens come up in mobile phones. Simply taking a picture can give web application to start and etc.
Currently, “Google has partnered with Buick, Disney, Diageo, T-mobile, and Delta Airlines to add their offline advertisements to the service”. - Google Goggles on Personal Computers: If Google develops the application that enable PC to take picture with a webcam and enable search with the image, or use the existing picture and enable searching, the use of Google Goggles will be enhanced.
- Google Goggles’ impact on Web Design: Assuming that people start to use the Google Goggles more frequently, via PC or smart phone, the impact will be big. While the current website designers must care about the reference and keywords to make their websites be at the top of search, if image recognition and search with image become important, web designers will have to be more careful in selecting which image they will be uploading on their pages. The most recognizable or frequently used image for Google Goggles will be important in selection of images. As for now Google Goggles is only made for the mobile app users, the current web designers who target the mobile users will be more serious in selecting the image, tag and etc. With Google Goggles enabled web, where to put the image with what tags and position will also be important factors of design. This will make the need of new methodology in web design.
- Privacy issue with Google Goggles: Google is currently suffering from privacy issues around the world due to the Google Street View. While the Street view takes the pictures around the world to create the Street View enabled map, there were some cases where people’s privacy have been exposed. The image recognition then also contains the similarity here. With the information stored in Google’s database, searching with image or taking image will give some privacy issues. For example, if someone took a picture of something and there was a person who did not intend to be in the picture, and some image search resulted in showing him, this would bring up some privacy issue. Actually, in United Kingdom, there were complaints about Google Picasa’s face recognition (that can scan your picture and suggest matching) and resulting privacy issues. This is not yet in Google Goggles’ functionality. However, Google have refused to rule out the Picasa’s face recognition functionality and public is watching if they are going to.
We can note that face recognition does have some advantage that people could use it to identify strangers in the street. However, the fact that a shot of picture could mine one’s profile gives weight on the privacy issue than the advantage.
Within this issue, disposal methodology is coming up and actually Google is trying to make a way for disposing the image taken that could give invasion of privacy.
Although we are living in a world where privacy is getting exposed more and more, there must be some public policy regarding the privacy issue for not only Google but for all sectors of society regarding digital information. And this might give some limit to the Google Goggles’ development. - Collaboration with existing Search methods: Google and various other companies did provide some engines that could use the voice for search. Google’s Voice Search is one of them. What this enables is that if someone simply says something through the microphone of the smart phone, the engine recognizes the words and auto-completes the search text.
This technology might give some advantage and synergy with the Google Goggles. If there is a way for image recognition based searching system to find images, there should be way for audio recognition system to find relevant audios. Actually, there are some mobile apps which can recognize music with a segment of music played.
Then, if you imagine using both these methods to search something, you will probably get higher accuracy in searching. For example, playing a segment of music with a picture of an album could enhance the search results (assuming both have higher accuracy).
If this is enabled, it also will give web designers more pain that the designers then have to select what music or audio file they must contain within their websites.
Furthermore, if all text, image, and voice search are enabled at the same time, the users could give more sources of search to the search engine. In other words, the search engines could receive more data to do the search. Eventually, and theoretically, this should give higher searching power. Thinking about this multiple media searching system, other web advertisements could give out various ways of advertisements with advertising market grown.
Conclusion:
In conclusion, Google’s Goggles has shown a new way of searching. It could give comfort for the users by giving them a new medium of searching. For Google itself, it could have another piece of information that could give search results. Being the world largest image recognition system in terms of the size of data stored in Google’s database, Google’s new way of searching also gives some vision of the “will be changed” search engine format. Through this innovation, Google provided the world all, text, image, and sound searching system and showed the potential of collaborative searching method. The impact of this may be great that the search itself will have evolution, and advertise market will grow both in quantity and quality. Moreover, other markets might have potential using it. The web environment and web designers might suffer the change that there are new sources of information that will contribute in searching. However, Google Goggles might have some limitation due to privacy issues. Just like they are suffering with Google Street Views, Google Goggles has the potential to have privacy issues. Then the regulations and policies might limit the change. Though overall, it is a great innovation giving the potentials. With these search application provided so far in the world, someday, there might be a way that a movie clip can search something we want to look for.
Videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hhgfz0zPmH4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kOotqpJyUg
Reference:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google
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