Google getting into Image Recognition

Hitwise had released figures indicating almost 10% of google search traffic is for image searches. There are no ad's with Google image search, simply because image search doesn't provide a good way to put contextual advertising on images. Google's purchase of Neven Vision can change all that. The official google blog talks about providing a better way to organize personal photos.

We've been working to make Picasa (Google's free photo-organizing software) even better when it comes to searching for your own photos—to make finding them be as easy as finding stuff on the web. Luckily we've found some people who share this goal, and are excited that the Neven Vision team is now part of Google.

In the long term, I hope google would be working on ways to put contextual ad's next to photos. Photos are the single biggest source of user generated content, far ahead of text and video.

It could be as simple as detecting whether or not a photo contains a person, or, one day, as complex as recognizing people, places, and objects

If the image recognition software were to mature, enough to identify objects and places in photos, it gives google an opportunity develop something of an "Adsense for Images". With the richness of Ajax, these images could be overlayed on images. In the short term, the technology would be put to test with Picassa , helping users to manage their photos better. Gigaom has more on this.

Riya's Munjal weigh's in .

What does this mean for us at Riya? It means we now have tangential competition but not yet direct since with Riya 2.0 we are focusing not on personal search but on webwide similarity search

I wouldn't be so sure, since Google is basically a search company and not a personal photo organizer. Webwide search would be a part of long term goal , which would bring it head on with Riya.

More about the company Google acquired from Google's cache. The company website has been replaced with a message, its has been acquired by Google.