Google Lens Ups the Ante on Image Search

Google Lens Earlier this week, at Google’s I/O 2018 conference, the search giant announced Google Lens, its latest rendition of image search based on image recognition and visual analysis. You can test Lens’ functionality, too, from an Android phone in the Google Photos app. Future of Image Search What does Google Lens say about the future of image search? For the 20 years, Google has relied on textual content to provide relevant search results. That relevance is key to Google’s value proposition — it’s the reason for 3.5 billion searches per day. All of those searchers equate to dollars from the sale of advertising and from monetizing the data. Grow and Thrive I hear from ecommerce companies who do not want to optimize for image search because they don’t want Google offering up their images for others to steal. And, you only need to manually optimize the pages and products that will return the highest value. But shopping is the purpose of an ecommerce site. But increasingly, consumers may see a product, snap a photo of it, and use Google Lens to find it, to purchase.

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Ecommerce businesses have a love-hate relationship with image search. They appreciate the conversion benefits, but they are wary of the labor required to optimize images and the risk of competitors stealing them.

Google’s announcements this week, however, show its commitment to searching the visual world and hint at the importance of image search and image search engine optimization to site owners.

Google Lens

Earlier this week, at Google’s I/O 2018 conference, the search giant announced Google Lens, its latest rendition of image search based on image recognition and visual analysis. Google Lens is being hailed as an augmented reality success, closer to fulfilling the promise of its predecessors, Google Goggle and Google Glass.

While searching for the name of a building may not have much impact on ecommerce SEO, Lens can do some compelling tricks that hit closer to home. For instance, it can decipher text and allow you to search on the contents, or copy and paste them into another app.

In the (near) future, starting first with Google’s Pixel phone, it will work within the native camera app to comparison shop based on, for example, an image of an outfit. Google has not released firm dates for this upgrade, but it demonstrated the capability at I/O this week.

Google's Lens example shows shopping for an outfit on an iPhone.
Google’s Lens example shows shopping for an outfit on an iPhone.

I tested the original (less-robust) version on Lens my Samsung phone, with encouraging but mixed results. Notice below that it finds the text in the image — even on my hand-written note — but misreads much of it. Not surprisingly, I suppose, it didn’t recognize my child’s writing on the pen holder. You can test Lens’ functionality, too, from an Android phone in the Google Photos app.

Text recognition in Google Lens is...

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