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Jan. 7, 2008

In July of last year, Google filed a patent application on image and video search technology. But it was only recently that it made the news public. Google wants to patent technology where search bots can understand specific text in images and video clips.

This has the potential of further changing the search landscape, especially as it concerns websites that have a lot of photos or links to video content.

Some industry observers suggest that privacy issues raised by Google Maps' Street View will get more complicated as eventually YouTube videos will be indexable via the text that appears within them.

Google's new image search technology would mean photographs indexed by Google would be searchable by the text located within the image or video itself. This of course is a huge step forward in indexing sites that have not previously been available for search.

Some interesting exceprts from Google's new patent can be found here:

Digital images can now include a large assortment of content. As an example, digital photos or illustrations can depict landscapes, people, urban scenes and other related objects.

Digital images often do include text, but were previously unavailable for search since it was impossible to index using older search technology. Digital images can be captured, for example, using cameras or digital video recorders. Image text (text inside an image) typically includes text of varying size, orientation, color and typeface.

For example, text in a digital image derived from an urban scene often provides information about the displayed landscape or specific location. A typical street scene would include text as part of street signs, building names, physical address numbers, window signs and a lot more.

At this point in time, it may be obvious to say that if Google has found a way to index text in static images and video clips that this is a big step forward in the advancement of search technology.

This could probably keep every book in the Google Books database really searchable, with the next step being YouTube, Flickr, Picasa Web and more.

This is exciting news and it will be interesting to see how Google develops this new image search technology that it has now patented.

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Source: Tech Crunch