Did you know 30% of the neurons in the cortex of the brain are for vision? It’s true! Humans process much of the world visually. Computers, on the other hand, don’t. Or at least they didn’t. Until recently, if you wanted to do a search for something you saw, you had to come up with the right words to type into the Search bar.


Sometimes it’s easy: “purple flower spiky leaves.” But other times... we don’t really know how to articulate what it is we’re looking at: “four person bicycle with thing on top?” And that’s where Google Lens comes in. It lets you instantly search what you see, without having to perfectly describe it first.


Look! It’s a... ruby-throated hummingbird! But how does it know?! When Lens looks at an image, it pays very close attention to all the details. It notices shapes, colors, textures, and shading. But what's instant and easy for humans is actually very difficult for computers. Lighting and shadows can affect shapes and colors, which in turn affect the data Lens has to work with, and sometimes a muffin can look like a chihuahua, and a puppy can look like a bagel! Have you ever done one of those spot-the-difference puzzles?


That’s what Lens is doing, but it’s actually more like spot-the-similarities. And instead of comparing two pictures, Lens compares one to about 15 billion to determine that THIS object is MOST LIKE these OTHER objects, which, it turns out, is a dog, not a bagel. But you don't always search for something just to see more pictures of it.


You want to know what it is! That’s where the Knowledge Graph comes in—a collection of billions of facts about people, places, and things. The Knowledge Graph understands relationships between objects. So it can help us understand and label them, and in this case, tell you that this particular dog is called a... Finnish Spitz! Lens is always working to help you search in more natural and intuitive ways. Soon, you'll be able to point Lens at something and ask questions about what you see, making it even easier to get help with objects in the world around you. We should always be able to learn about whatever we’re curious about.


Even if we don’t quite know what we’re looking at.