Trojan horse
The tech world is awash with examples of companies simultaneously competing and cooperating, but it must really irritate Apple to see Google continually adding to the Google mobile products iOS users can get via their devices for free.
The main one is the Google Mobile App, which is actually a collection of products bundled into one app, with the common aim of making it easier for iPhone and iPad users to search for stuff using Google. So you have voice search, location-based search and contact search, all on top of Google being the default search engine in mobile Safari.
Now Google has announced the addition of Goggles to its iPhone app. Just to remind you: Goggles is a visual search app, which allows you to take a photo of something and have Google tell you everything it can about it.
To be honest, we've found Google Goggles to be a bit hit and miss. Even some QR codes, which are specially designed for this sort of thing, have yielded nothing on our Android 2.1 phone.
But every now and then it exceeds your expectations and does something useful. For example its potential as a business card reader seems strong - it gives you the option of adding the info derived from your photo of a card into your contacts - but it could be smarter about how it interacts with the database.
In the blog post Google software engineer Milan Broum conceded Goggles is still a work in progress: "Computer vision is a hard problem and Google Goggles is still a Labs product," he said. "It works well for things such as landmarks, logos and the covers of books, DVDs and games. However, it doesn't yet work for some things you might want to try like animals, plants or food."
It will be interesting to see how far Google can take its mobile products on iOS. We've read some commentators talking about Google giving away Android's competitive advantage by doing this, but that misses the point. The more people search for stuff on Google, the more money Google makes. In that respect it doesn't matter where they do it from, it's just that Android is optimised for all this stuff. Why else do you think Google gives Android away for free?
Apple doesn't have a search product so, in principle, it shouldn't care how its users search for stuff. But Google and Apple are the current heavy hitters - and arch competitors - in the mobile Internet land-grab, and it can't be nice to see your own users contributing to the success of your main rival.
