Google Search: Now Scanned Images are Searchable.

Posted by Abbas ||

October 31, 2008 ||

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Google just announced the capabilities to read through and make searchable, scanned pictures or documents in the PDF format. This is made possible using the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technologies.

This technology does not come as a surprise to me as Google was in the process of scanning millions and millions of documents from the library and other sources, besides making those scanned copies available on Book search, now with the use of this technology the scanned information can also be shown in the search results.
So now don’t be surprised if you search for something on Google and one of the pictures from your vacations shows up.

Also, don’t be surprised if you see some out of the box results as this is a new technology which will be fine tuned with time and Google actually admits that it’s not easy to do it.

“To people reading these documents, the distinction between words and pictures of words makes little difference, but for a computer the picture is almost unintelligible. Consider a circle. Should it be read it as a zero, the letter ‘O’, just a circle, or the ring from my coffee cup? People learn to answer this kind of question very quickly, but for the computer it is a painstaking and error-prone process.”

Here are a few examples that are mentioned on the blog which show the technology in action:

[repairing aluminum wiring]
[spin lock performance]
[Mumps and Severe Neutropenia]
[Steady success in a volatile world]