Today, Google announced that they were introducing Real Time Search. It's a feed of stories that constantly updates on your search page with new sources, including Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and other sources. (The videos they provide include search topics like "Obama" "Twilight Reviews" and "Traffic on 101.")

And they also announced Google Goggles, which is a photo search available on Android phones:

Use pictures to search the web.

A picture is worth thousand words.No need to type your search anymore. Just take a picture.

Find out what businesses are nearby.Just point your phone at a store.

This is just the beginning - it's not quite perfect yet. Works well for some things, but not for all.

I took a photo of an off-brand Mexican Spider-Man action figure (at left), and got exactly nothing in my search. Google couldn't identify it. Nor could it identify The Stranger, giving me a bunch of gobbledygook instead. It did nail the cover of The Financial Lives of the Poets, sending me to the Google Books result, Amazon, Jess Walter's website, and the publisher's site. It apparently can also identify landmarks, storefronts, logos, wine, and artwork. My favorite part, though, is that you can take a photo of a business card and it will import the information as a contact to your Google account. That actually seems quite useful to me, and it worked twice perfectly with two business cards I happen to have hanging around my desk.

So no, Google Goggles aren't perfect, but they do seem to do fine work at transforming real world text into searchable computer terms. None of this seems especially new to me—I already have a book-identifying scanner on my phone, and I know a few companies already make business card scanning software—but it is convenient, and much of Google's fortune is built on convenience. I'd call this another win for them.