Today, Google announced some new features for its Google Goggles product, the mobile search app, which lets you search by snapping a picture. There is a new map view of your search history, the ability to copy contact and text results to the clipboard, and some changes to the results interface.
“If you’ve enabled search history on Goggles, your history contains a list of all the images that you’ve searched for, as well as some information about where you performed the search if you chose to share your location with Google. Sometimes this can be a pretty long list, so we wanted to give you another way to sort and visualize your Goggles results,” says Google Goggles software engineer George Nachman. “We’ve added a map view, which shows your Goggles image search history on a map so you can quickly zoom and pan to find a query from a particular location.”
In terms of the clipboard stuff, you can grab URLs or phone numbers from signs, and copy the text to your phone’s clipboard so you can paste it into different apps. That’s pretty handy.
Google revealed at its Inside Search event last week that Google Goggles now supports Russian. The company talked a little more about this today.
@GoogleMobile
Google MobileGoogle Goggles learns to read Russian: http://t.co/VFaRJNs
2 hours ago via web · powered by @socialditto
“Since Google Goggles first launched in 2009, it has been able to recognize and translate text in a number of different languages, as long as the language used Latin characters. With the launch of OCR for Russian, Goggles is now able to read Cyrillic characters. Goggles will recognize a picture of Russian text and allow you to translate the text into one of over 40 other languages. Russian OCR is also available for users of Google Goggles on the Google Search app for iOS. Очень полезно!”
Also last week, Google announced the launch of Search by Image, which basically takes Google Goggles to the desktop, letting you upload an image and search for results based on that.