To my surprise, Google Goggles actually launched last night, not 12 hours after I posted about it yesterday. I’ve just spent a while playing around with it on my Android handset. Search times are, as expected, much more than one second, more in the anticipated 5-10 second range. Good to see that even Google can’t break the laws of physics. The app shows a pretty-but-pointless image analysis animation to make the wait seem shorter, almost exactly like my tongue-in-cheek suggestion from yesterday.
The engine covers all the easy verticals (books, DVDs, logos, landmarks, products, text, etc). The recognition quality is very good, though the landing pages are often a bit useless. It will take a bit of living with it to see how much use it is as a tool rather than a tech demo.
The major worry is that it may end up being too broad-but-shallow. For example, they do wine recognition, but the landing pages are generic. Perhaps visual wine recognition would be better built into Snoot or some other dedicated iPhone wine app. Or Google could take the route Bing recently took with recipes, and build rich landing pages for each vertical. Because of the nature of current visual search technology, Goggles is essentially a number of different vertical searches glued together, so this is more feasible than it would be for web search.
Certainly an interesting week for visual search!