Microsoft is working on technology to allow users to search the internet using photos taken by cell phone cameras, reports Ben Charny in eWeek's Google Watch blog. The images, sent by email, constitute the search query. The technology, dubbed Photo2Search, returns web pages that contain similar images or have information about the objects in the photo. One goal of the Microsoft technology, conceptualized in late 2004, is to augment text search, using a combination that returns more useful search results. (Google last week received a patent for searching the internet via voice queries.)

But after more than a year of effort, Xing Xie, a researcher for the Web Search and Mining group within Microsoft Research Asia, says "the coolest thing is that you can use a pure image as a query, with no text. That is a totally new search experience."

"We hope, in the future, when a user submits a photo to, for example, MSN Spaces, we can quickly figure out the latitude and the longitude of that photo by using our technology," Xie says. "There is still a lot to do to make this technology into products. If we can make it practical, then this is a big contribution for both local-search and mobile-search products."

He says the technology "aims to solve the problem of mapping a physical-world object to a digital-world object. You see an object in the physical world, and you want to know the corresponding information in the digital world - for example, its price on the web, user comments, or websites. There are many different solutions: You can use a bar code or radio-frequency identification. But using a picture of the object is very convenient and very easy to deploy."