Google Patents More Ubiquitous Advertising

There’s a good deal of fuss being made in the tech press today about some recently-revealed patent applications from Google – TechCrunch, Information Week, and ComputerWorld are among the media outlets with the details. The basic idea behind the patents is that it’s now possible to recognize text in arbitrary images – pictures of street scenes or the interior of stores, for example. And where there is text, there is an indexing-and-search opportunity for Google.

Much of the speculation focuses on a section of the patent that contemplates a sort of “Google Store Indexer,” in which a robot with a camera roves up and down the aisles of a grocery or hardware store, taking pictures of the stock on shelves which can then be indexed for location and content. While an interesting thought, it doesn’t take much reflection to realize that currently it would be cost-prohibitive to roll out this sort of service on any but a very limited scale. The average grocery store, for example, would need to be reindexed daily or weekly to stay up to date, and there’s a limit to the number of robots that even the behemoth of Mountain View can deploy.

However, reading through the actual patent verbiage does turn up another interesting section:

“In one implementation, advertisements are presented along with the presented image. For example, an advertisement can be presented for the business identified in the image. Alternatively, one or more advertisements can be presented for alternative businesses. Additionally, the advertisement can be for one or more products associated with the business in the presented image, user search terms, or according to other criteria.”

Assuming that the actual image recognition works, that implementation is something that Google could use today, on one of its current products: Google Street View. There’s an existing database of a huge number of photographs in enough resolution to permit text recognition, just begging to be monetized. How long will it be before you AdWords purchase on “accountant” can pop up a small ad on screen anyone strolls by an accountant’s office in this virtual rendition of the world? Not too long, if this scenario comes to pass.

Of course, it’s worth bearing in mind that Google, like any other big company, has a portfolio of patents that they’ll never actually use. The road between idea and workable implementation is long and twisted, and many things don’t make it out of the labs. But if this one does, I’m willing to bet that advertising opportunities drive it at least as much as any altruistic desire to index the world.

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