Google Goggles

Point your phone at a landmark, a book or a wine label and Google told you what it was, eight years before Lens replaced it

Replaced
19902026

Google Goggles was a visual search app, released for Android on 7 December 2009 and for iPhone in October 2010, that identified landmarks, books, artwork, logos, wine labels, barcodes and text from a photo, translated signs and solved Sudoku puzzles. Development stopped in 2014, Google Lens took over the idea in 2017, and Goggles was withdrawn from the Play Store on 20 August 2018 with a last update telling users to install Lens.

Timeline [edit]

  1. 2009
  2. 7 December 2009 Launch
    Google Goggles for Android

    Landmarks, books, logos, wine labels, text.

  3. 2010
  4. 5 October 2010 Launch
    Goggles for iPhone

    Inside the Google Mobile app.

  5. 2011
  6. 10 January 2011 Feature
    Sudoku solver and barcode scanning
  7. 2014
  8. 2014 Decline
    Last update
  9. 2017
  10. 4 October 2017 other
    Google Lens ships

    The successor, in Photos and the Assistant.

  11. 2018
  12. 16 August 2018 Shutdown announced
    Final update tells users to install Lens
  13. 20 August 2018 Shutdown
    Removed from the Play Store

The site through time

Browse google.com as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

2009 2011 2013 2015 2017 2018 Full archive →

Ownership [edit]

Google 2009–2018 Founded

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: In August 2018 Google pushed a final update to the Goggles app that did nothing but tell users to install Google Lens, then removed it from the Play Store on 20 August 2018. The app had not been updated since 2014. Lens, launched in October 2017 inside Google Photos and the Assistant, did the same job with the machine-learning models Google had built since, and became part of the camera app on Android phones.

Our analysis: Goggles was visual search before the neural networks that make visual search work: it matched features against a database of landmarks, book covers, logos, artworks and text, and was impressive when it worked and useless the rest of the time. Google let it sit for four years while it built the vision models that became Lens, and then it was simply the old way to do the thing. It was not killed by a competitor; it was killed by its own successor.

History [edit]

Search by camera

Google Goggles launched as a Labs project on 7 December 2009 for Android 1.6 and above: take a picture, and the app matched it against Google's image indexes to recognise landmarks, book and album covers, artwork, wine labels, logos, business cards and printed text, then ran a search on what it found. It could not yet do faces (Google said it had decided not to), plants or food, and it was slow and often wrong, but pointing a phone at the Eiffel Tower and getting the Wikipedia article was a good trick in 2009. Barcodes and QR codes, translation of text via Google Translate, and a Sudoku solver followed in 2010 and 2011, and the iPhone version arrived inside the Google Mobile app in October 2010, then on its own.

Goggles was folded into the main Google Search app on Android in 2012, and the standalone app's last real update came in 2014. What Google had learned from it went into the deep-learning image models it was building for Photos and Search.

Lens

Google Lens was announced at I/O in May 2017 and shipped in October 2017 in Google Photos and the Assistant on the Pixel 2, doing what Goggles had promised: recognise objects, read and translate text, identify plants and animals, copy Wi-Fi passwords off a router. Goggles was left in the Play Store, uninstallable on new phones, until August 2018, when an update replaced its whole interface with a message directing users to Lens, and on 20 August 2018 it was removed. Lens became part of the Android camera and, in 2022, of Google Search itself.

The domain today

The Goggles pages on google.com redirect to Google Lens.

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Sources [edit]

  1. Google Goggles: Google's scary good visual search app Gizmodo 7 December 2009 [archived]
  2. Confirmed: Google Goggles will reach other platforms PCWorld 8 December 2009 [archived]
  3. Google Goggles is dead, now prompts users to install Lens Android Police 16 August 2018 [archived]
  4. Google Goggles app gets updated to announce its death PhoneArena 17 August 2018

Last verified: 16 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).