Google on Thursday announced a very interesting integration between its main search service and Google+ Photos. The company now lets you find your photos both on Google+ and Google Search just by, well, searching for them.
Assuming you’re signed in, all you have to do is search for “my photos” on google.com or directly on Google+. Yet this goes further than just serving you a list of all your photos; Google says it has now also started using computer vision and machine learning to understand what your query.
Google lists a few examples of possible queries that work, such as sunsets, food, and flowers. To find the last one, all you need to type in is “my photos of flowers” and you should get back something similar to this:
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The word “photos” is the only key word. You can search for your own photos as well as those of your friends: “my photos from new york last year” or “matt’s photos of food.”
What’s amazing here is that these results are not being served based on tags, captions, or other ways to denote what is in a given photo. Google is analyzing the content of all your photos and deciding which ones are relevant to your query.
From our tests, the computer vision part works pretty well, and Google will of course be constantly improving it via the machine learning component. This particular integration doesn’t have a beta tag or anything of the sort, so we can assume it’s ready for mass use.
Still, this is definitely a feature that will be far from perfect for a long time. The more queries Google receives from users, however, the better it will become.
It’s just too bad that the technology is limited to Google+. Hopefully Facebook is paying attention. This is just as, if not more, interesting than Graph Search.
See also – Google’s new Google+ photo features: 15GB full-size storage, Auto Highlight, Auto Enhance and more and Google+ app for Android updated with new photo-editing features, related hashtags and locations area
Top Image Credit: Kimihiro Hoshino/Getty Images
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