Parents' Guide to Google Goggles

Google Goggles is strong with items like logos, UPC codes, book titles, landmarks, maps, business cards, and products in general -- basically easily recognizable stuff with a strong web presence -- but it's not all-encompassing quite yet, since general views, products or companies with a smaller web presence, landscapes, animals, food, and plants bring up images with a similar graphic composition but not necessarily a direct connection. Some really useful applications are product (and price) research while shopping, scanning in contact info from business cards, and nearly hands-free searching -- for landmarks while on a family road trip, for example.

While it's quite easy to use, and the Tips & Tricks page gives a simple, icon-driven list of "app-effective" items, the app lacks any kind of general orientation or explanation of what it does. Of course, users can find a video online at the Google Mobile page, and after a few tries, it'll be obvious to most users. The translation feature integrates Google's superb web-based translation website, but the app seems to struggle with categorizing text as text, so the translate button does not come up every time text is scanned.