Google Goggles Now in Russian, With Search Map View

Google Goggles is getting a lot of work these days, with the search engine adapting its visual search technology to provide image search on desktop computers and enabling it to recognize Russian at its Inside Search event.

Goggles is the company's visual search application, which lets users take pictures with their smartphone cameras to retrieve information about landmarks, Sudoku puzzles and other 2D objects.

Now Goggles users who have enabled search history may see a list of all the images for which they've searched. Moreover, Goggle users who share their location with Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) will see a list of information about where the search was performed.

For heavy Goggles users, this list can grow long, so Google added a map view that shows users their Goggles image search history on a map.

This lets users zoom and pan to find a query from a particular location. Users who dislike or tire of the map view may toggle back to the list view by clicking the list button shown in the upper right of this sample screenshot in Google's blog post on the new features.

Google also just added the ability for Goggles users to copy text, such as a URL or phone number from a sign that they have taken a picture of, to their phone's clipboard for pasting in apps later.

Google said the new features are available in Goggles 1.5 from the Android Market.

As for the Russian optical character recognition (OCR) and translation, the advancement marks the first time Goggles is able to read and grok Cyrillic characters.

This means Goggles will recognize a picture of Russian text shot from Goggles via an Android smartphone or the Google Search app for iOS and translate the text into one of over 40 other languages.

The new Goggles features come one week after Google introduced image and voice search on the desktop, as well as new mobile interface perks at its Inside Search event.