Google patent applications published this week reveal the company’s ambition to “read” images and video – i.e., to recognize and understand text in them. This has obvious implications for video and image search, and significant implications for SEO and web accessibility, as search engines currently rely on oft-insufficient alt text, on-page keyword tags and other surrounding text to make sense (or not) of an image on the web.

Because Google has been taking pictures for the Google Maps Street View feature, an image-text reading capability means it gets closer to its goal of indexing the entire world, which would be a boon for its local search capabilities. Google explains in its application:

Digital images can include a wide variety of content. For example, digital images can illustrate landscapes, people, urban scenes, and other objects. Digital images often include text. Digital images can be captured, for example, using cameras or digital video recorders… Image text (i.e., text in an image) typically includes text of varying size, orientation, and typeface. Text in a digital image derived, for example, from an urban scene (e.g., a city street scene) often provides information about the displayed scene or location. A typical street scene includes, for example, text as part of street signs, building names, address numbers, and window signs.

The patents also specifically mention indexing images taken in stores and museums (with robots, natch), which again would have a huge impact on local business and also on education. And of course, video search would get infinitely more sophisticated if Google learns to understand text spoken in videos.

One caveat: Information Week notes that Street View privacy issues will get even more complicated. It’s definitely something to be concerned about; though online privacy is really a thing of the past at this point, violations (perceived or real) of offline privacy will really get people up in arms. But it’s a good bet that’s something that will get ironed out if this innovation comes to pass soon, because it would really change search in a huge way.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 4th, 2008 at 12:34 pm and is filed under Google, Search: Image, Search: Innovations, Search: Video, SEO, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.