Google Goggles Upgraded

Google has released version 1.3 of Goggles, the mobile application which uses a phone's camera to search the internet by taking a picture.

Search speed has been improved and a number of new features have been added too.

Point your phone at an unsolved sudoku puzzle and your phone will show you an image of the solved puzzle within 5 or 10 seconds.

Barcode scanning of QR codes and EAN13's is now faster.

Contact details from a business card, newspaper or magazine can be quickly imported into the phone as text. 

If you are in a bar or at a dinner party and you like the bottle of wine on the table, take a picture and you'll still be able to remember the name of it the next morning.




Google Goggles also allows you to translate text from English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish, and translate it into many more from Albanian and Catalan to Swedish or Portugese.


The tranlate feature works by taking a picture and drawing a box around the words to be translated then choosing the source and destination languages.







Start thinking about Google Goggles and SEO

Google states that taking images from a computer monitor may not work perfectly, but thinking about Goggles when planning an SEO strategy for retailers is now essential.

Ranking well in Google's image search is the key, so in addition to images of products on a website, a clear   image of the product's label, along with good alt tags and a well named image name should be spiderable by the Googlebot.

A user who finds your product in a shop or at a friends house and searches for it using Goggles should then be taken straight to your website.