Google announced Wednesday at its annual I/O 2022
conference plans to expand its search by image and text tools -- which work together -- to find local businesses in Google Maps and Google Search. The idea is to view local query results from both
simultaneously.
Google Senior Vice President Prabhakar Raghavan said that with "natural-language understanding and computer vision, "we’re transforming search to be much more magical and
helpful than ever before. … This is our vision for the future of search.”
Raghavan said voice search gets hundreds of millions of voice queries daily. Adoption is higher among new
internet users … “but often seeing is understanding,” he added.
Lens is used about 8 billion times monthly -- up about three times the total last year.
Multisearch
-- which Google launched last month -- combines Lens and text-based search. Multisearch uses the phone’s camera to search by an image, powered by Google Lens, and then adds an additional text
query to return visual search results.
Look for a picture or screenshot containing using Lens, and add the keywords "near me" as the additional text. Google will search for physically close
businesses to the searcher’s proximity.
Multisearch Near Me will become available later this year in English and will be available for more languages in time.
Today, this
technology recognizes objects captured in one frame, but sometimes people might want information about an entire scene to get information.
Soon users will have an option to pan a camera, ask a
question, and create a query to gain answers. Google calls this Scene Exploration.
Scene Exploration will allow users to pan the phone’s camera in a wide scene and get context
about multiple things in the frame. One example, according to Google, would be shopping for a chocolate bar without nuts for a friend and scanning an entire candy shelf to show all available options
before buying the correct one.