• Computerworld, Friday, February 25, 2011 12 PM

Imagine a day when any stranger with a smartphone can snap your picture on the street, and immediately learn you name, along with all manner of personal information and history. Based on recent patents published by Google, that day is coming sooner than you think. The most recent patent, as Computerworld notes, involves using facial recognition and social networking combined to give visual search results.

"Other patent filings have recently become public, suggesting Google has been working all along to apply visual query technology to searching for faces," it writes. Meanwhile, Google's recent patent filing for User Interface for Presenting Search Results for Multiple Regions of a Visual Query suggests that Google's visual search for smartphones may be evolving.

Last year, Google acquired Like.com which is a visual search engine currently used for shopping, but was previously a visual search service called Riya which used facial recognition technology to search images that users had uploaded and tagged.

Read the whole story at Computerworld »