Without a lot of fanfare, Google launched Google Goggles earlier this week in Google Labs. Google Goggles allows users to take a picture of a physical object, and get relevant information about that object almost instantaneously. Right now, you can do this for landmarks, books, business cards, artwork, places, wine and logos.

Google Goggles has the promise to become something HUGE. It currently represents a better way to do contextual search – without having to open a web browser and type in a search query. It makes a lot of sense and plays to Google’s strengths, since it has all of this information indexed already. As image recognition technology improves, this will become a major way for people to obtain contextual information. We have no doubt that one day, you can get all the relevant information you want pertaining to an object you are looking at, without even the need to search or point your smartphone at it. Google is on a good path to be the pioneer in this vision.

Google Goggles is currently only available on Android 1.6+ smartphones, and you can get it directly from Android Market.

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