Google Introduces 'Search by Image' for Desktop

Google announced this week several new features that aim to further erase the barriers between you and the information you want.

Google's Voice Search and Search by Image allow users to quickly and easily explore the Web without typing a single word. Speech recogniton software drives Voice Search to recognize what you're saying--whether you're at your desktop PC or roaming on your cell phone. According to Google's blog, the software recognizes 230 billion words from real queries.

Voice Search can apparently find anything you're looking for, from the simple ("Italian restaurants") to the complex ("translate to Spanish the nearest Mexican restaurant"). Clearly, Google is leading the way in speech recognition innovation.

In the meantime, Search by Image takes Google Goggles to the desktop. Upload an image or choose one from the Web, and the computer vision technology will compare it against an extensive database of photos from all over the world.

Try it out when digging through old vacation photos and trying to identify landmarks—the search [mountain path] probably isn’t going to tell you where you were, but computer vision may just do the trick.

The new search capabilities are rolling out in 40 languages as we speak. Try them out at images.google.com!