For example, taking a picture of a famous landmark searches for information about it, or taking a picture of a product's barcode would search for information on the product.

While initially only available in a beta version for Android phones, Google announced its plans to enable the software to run on other platforms, notably iPhone and BlackBerry devices.

[5][6] The system could identify various labels or landmarks, allowing users to learn about such items without needing a text-based search.

The system could identify products barcodes or labels that allow users to search for similar products and prices, solve sudokus from photographs,[7] and save codes for future reference, similar to the CueCat from late 1990s.

The system also recognized printed text and uses optical character recognition (OCR) to produce a text snippet, and in some cases even translate the snippet into another language.