For those who have been following my articles for a while, you are no doubt aware of the existence of Google Lens, Google’s new “digital photo search” feature. I had been concerned that Google Lens would be a lame flash version of traditional search technology that allowed people to type in a keyword phrase and get back only limited results.
So I was certainly pleased to learn that Google Lens does actually give you a way to do search engine-style, flash-style online searching using your favorite search term. When I first tried it out on the popular topic of wallpapers, I couldn’t believe how many more results I got than when I typed “wallpapers.”
Once I learned that Google Lens works the same way as the web’s other search technologies, such as Google’s PageRank, and Bing’s relevance score, it really doesn’t matter that the actual search is being done with keywords. With the advanced algorithms that Google has built into its Lens service, you can now search by virtually any quality of the topic that you can think of. Google Lens allows users to type in anything they want to know about any topic using only their keyboard.
One of the other most interesting features of Google Lens is that it can read the metadata (such as the keywords you use) of any photo it can “see.” Meaning, if you take a picture of something, and then you save it to your computer, it will be indexed by Google Lens. The more relevant the pictures of the item, the better the Google Lens will be able to find them.
You can also use Google Lens to help direct you to websites where the item you searched for may be displayed. For example, if you search for “kids wall clocks,” you can tell Google Lens to point you in the direction of some sites that sell those products. If you’re thinking that maybe you’d like to buy some kids wall clocks, and the keywords are out of your vocabulary, but you still know how to spell the product name, you can tell Google Lens to point you to the right place.
And when you use the Google Lens feature to go to a site, you can also see what the original item’s description was before it was modified by the website. This makes it even easier to figure out if what you’re seeing is the exact item you were looking for.
I’m pretty sure that Google knows a lot about how the web works, and therefore, I’m pretty sure that it knows what people are searching for on the web. After all, you might ask, why is Google starting from scratch by creating an entirely new database for itself to search? Well, it could very well be because Google Lens is also used for search in the location-services category.
With location, people are actively being asked to give their GPS data to the web users, so that Google Maps can show people where they need to go. This is just one more way that Google is recognizing the need for its millions of internet users to contribute to the social media giant’s progress.