Goggles supports searches of books, DVDs, popular landmarks, company logos, barcodes, products etc. The search base will grow in time as more and more data is attached to the search.

When an image is captured, the app breaks it down into signatures of objects. These signatures are then compared to the image database. Within a short time it retrieves results that closely match the signature that is present in your image. Some results are generated even without the picture using GPS and the compass functions found on the android phones.

You can walk up to a storefront, click a picture, and in seconds you could be looking at links that are associated with the business. You could get ratings, reviews or price lists as well. The same goes for books or DVDs. Though with the present beta version, there are a fair number of misses coupled with the hits the potential of the product is not hard to see.

Keyword based search is pretty much the only option most of us have when it comes to search. Using rich media like pictures to do the same operation can radically change the game. Even SEO experts will find this a new avenue, as most strategies that are currently implemented deal with language based search.

The movement from text to visual search can potentially mean that the importance of good content will rise. Since the search will be based on signatures of the object in the image, relevant content becomes easier to index in a sense. The actual implementation at Google might be complex, but this aspect is hard to miss.

Presently, Goggles is only released to Android phone users. No timeline has been given on when the product might be available to other smart phones like the iPhone and the BlackBerry. Good news however is that eventually the app will be available to the other phones as well, and Google will not be looking to restrict it to just the Android phones.

The initial limited release is intended to be more of a test version. Vic Gundotra, Google’s VP of Engineering has this to say, “Today Goggles recognizes certain images in certain categories, but our goal is to return high-quality results for any image.”

The current version of Goggles, by admission of Google, barely scratches the surface of the power of this kind of visual search.  Some examples of future applications are identifying images like leaves and returning the name of the plant, or possibly get help with a chess game by taking a picture!

There is a product called “Sixth Sense” that is being developed at MIT by students. It seems like Goggles and Sixth Sense have some common traits. Both products vie to ID the world, and make it possible to index everything that exists in the physical world, and make it accessible seamlessly in the digital world. And in the distant future, maybe we will have search that could work off our brain waves.

Until this future arrives, at least for the time being, people seem to be happy to let Google show us the way forward.

Though the feature in itself is still in its nascent stages the video scripts that now get associated with a video will help give YouTube content a robust presence online. The captions will get indexed on search engines, and the relevancy of video search results will improve as a result.

As of now, few videos online enjoy the companionship of captions. Most videos would rely on just the title and some meta-data for search engine indexing. With captioning, now video can be looked at almost like traditional text content. For example, if a video on cooking is posted, it is likely that words like meat, vegetables etc show up on content. Unlike just relying on the title that says “xyz recipe” the actual video script now will enhance its ranking and relevance to a certain keyword.

Google will be using Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) to generate English subtitles. Though initially it is said to be limited in performance, it is said to improve in stages as time goes by. YouTube traffic could potentially rise much higher than its current levels as a result. Lot of work has been going on with the image search lately, and this addition to video search could be a vital avenue for internet marketing and SEO of any form.

This automated generation of captions will first be applied to thirteen partner channels. Currently they include channels like UC Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, Yale, UCLA, Duke, UCTV, Columbia, PBS, National Geographic, Demand Media, UNSW and some Google and YouTube channels.

Through another feature called Automatic Timing, users can manually add captions to their video. To carry out this task, users will need to supply a text file with the script that is used in the video. It is different from traditional subtitle files (.srt files) in the sense that it does not need to contain any timing information. Google will automatically synchronize the words with the spoken data in the video.

With Google embroiled in anti-trust cases around the globe, this feature certainly does help make Google look less evil than it is made out to be.

Another story going around is that of the Google phone. No official statement speaks of the release of the phone anytime soon, but a report at TechCrunch has led a number of industry watchers to believe it will indeed be a reality in the new future. What exactly the impact of this product is a little tricky to assess. Some warn Google from entering the hardware business as it might actually harm their current service oriented industry. Hardware is a complex industry and the returns are much lower than in the service industry. At the moment they seem to be doing most things right and almost always have better than their competition. Venturing into the phone industry could alienate some of its current partners who manufacture handheld devices.

And another product that has Google in the news is its visual search prototype: Image Swirl. A limited version of it is available on Google Labs for a trial run. Image Swirl is Google’s attempt at thwarting the Visual Search service provided by Bing. It is an interface for picture searching that uses a cluster of similar images laid out in a tree like manner. It’s quite intuitive to use and uses visual segregation of images based on their meta-data. This is a far cry from the grid format used by Google previously. For the first time, Google has tried to implement a snazzy looking interface which was up until now pretty much a white background with thumbnails on them.

Google has been around for a while, but never did we hear of an OS, a phone , a new search algorithm, a visual search interface and a host of other products all come out of their warehouses at pretty much the same time. The economic text books talk about competition in markets as a favorable factor. Bing seems to have pushed Google out of its comfort zone and its driving both companies to come up with radically new services for the consumer who is never tired of better technology. For the folks sitting at home and watching this unfold, this could be a very Bingy Christmas and a Google-y New Year!

This isn’t the first case filed against Google based on privacy concerns either. United Kingdom, Canada, Greece and Japan have also filed lawsuits against Street View. Google’s problems don’t stop with Street View either. They have been pulled into legal battles concerning Google Latitude, Gmail and Google Dashboard.

The common thread that connects these cases is the growing sense of privacy intrusion. With better and better indexing capabilities, the amounts of information that Google carries is reaching scary proportions. If you aren’t a mountain dwelling ascetic, chances are, Google will have some data on you stored somewhere in its massive archives.

Though Google has not really done anything that gives us reason to believe they have evil intentions, uneasiness is natural. Just the fact that there exists a repository with the most up to date information of the world and everyone and everything on it is slowly starting to trickle into public consciousness. Privacy is almost becoming a myth with each passing day.

Stopping Google from providing their wonderful services isn’t a good choice either. Making it more transparent and somehow reducing its impact on consumer privacy should be a top priority. While Google gets around to striking a good balance, users should meditate over the price at which their convenience comes.

They had also taken over AdMob, a mobile phone advertising firm. The $750 million dollar acquisition now gives Google a firm foothold in the mobile advertising domain. Though it does have limited market as of now, there is no doubt about the future of mobile computing. And it is no secret that Google’s major share of revenue still comes from advertising despite the large array of other services they provide.

A survey by E-Bay points to the growing amount of internet trade. The most important find was its debunking of the myth that internet sales was hurting traditional sales. The survey suggests that internet sales only add to the sustainability of a traditional business. With Yahoo! and Bing coming out with better products as well, internet marketing seems like it is set to progress to a new level in the near future. It will be interesting times for SEO experts as they scramble to get their strategies in place to handle the upcoming changes. The shift from computer based advertising to mobile based advertising opens up a whole new department with the SEO division.

Amidst all the commercial uproar that goes on in SEO battles, some consumer privacy advocates have a sobering reminder. There is a growing sense of lack of security as increasing amounts of data from personal spheres are being made more readily available on the internet. If these concerns are not publicly satisfied the projected growth of this industry can face unexpected hurdles.