Share and personalize your Google Goggles experience with Goggles 1.4

Since its launch, we have worked to make Google Goggles faster and more accurate when returning search results for a wide variety of images. Today, we are taking several steps to make Goggles a better and more personal experience. Goggles 1.4 for Android devices introduces an enhanced search history experience, the ability to suggest better results to Google if we are not able to accurately match your image, and improved business card recognition.

Enhanced search history
The new search history experience lets you search your Goggles results, make personal notes on specific results and share your results with friends. When you add a personal note to a Goggles result, the note will appear in your search history. I’m trying to learn more about wine, so when I taste something new, it’s easy for me to add a note to help me remember what I liked about the wine. Later, I can search my search history for words in my note to help me find that bottle that went so well with steak. Read more about how to enable search history for Goggles here.

To make a personal note, tap the pencil in the corner when viewing a search result.

Notes are intended to help you better organize your search history, so if you choose to share a result with a friend, your notes will not be shared. However, you can always add a personalized message to your friend when you share your results with them.

Share a result by sending a link to your friends.

Suggest a better result
We are constantly working to improve the accuracy of Goggles at recognizing certain categories of items, but visual recognition is still a complicated task. With Goggles 1.4, you are now able to suggest a better result when Goggles cannot find an image match, or the quality of the result is poor.

To send your suggestion to Google, tap “Can you suggest a better result?” on the results page. You can then select the relevant part of the image and submit a tag. Tags will be used to improve recognition in object categories where Goggles already provides some results, like artwork or wine bottles.

When suggesting a better result, you can crop the image and add a description.

Improved business card recognition
Business card recognition is one of the most popular uses of Google Goggles, so we're rolling out some new updates to make the experience even quicker and easier. Additionally, instead of simply recognizing the content as text, Goggles now recognizes the information as a contact, making it easier to add to your phone's contact list.

Call or add the person directly as a contact

Google Goggles is available for Android 1.6+ devices. Download it by visiting Android Market or by scanning the QR code below:

Posted by Jacob Smullyan, Software Engineer