Google to Make Online Apps Work Offline

By Greg McNevin

June 1, 2007: Google has launched two new interesting bits of technology this week, the first a much talked about application to make web applications usable offline and the second is an slightly unnerving piece of facial recognition software it has slipped into its search engine.

The first new bit of kit, Google Gears, is an open source system that enables the creation of web applications that can be used offline, or add offline features to current web apps. Google says the software will help address concern with the limitations of web applications, such as the availability of data and applications themselves when no Internet connection is available, or when a connection is slow or unreliable.

Gears could prove invaluable in many situations, but perhaps none more than Google’s online office suite. Email could be composed using Gmail and sent when a user connects to the web and other data on remote servers could be cached locally then synchronised again when connected.

“With Google Gears we're tackling a key limitation of the browser in order to make it a stronger platform for deploying all types of applications and enabling a better user experience in the cloud,” said Eric Schmidt, Chief Executive Officer of Google.

The second addition to Google’s arsenal this week was far less heralded, which is probably why it feels a little creepy. The company has quietly added new face recognition features to its image search, enabling generic image search results to be filtered to bring forward results with faces.

Discovered by Google Blogoscoped, adding &imgtype=face to the end of any image search URL will display only photos of people. Arstechnica.com notes that the search upgrade is seemingly connected with Google’s acquisition of Neven Vision in 2006 and its photo scanning and facial recognition software.

It is not known exactly how accurate the technology is at this point, but some commentators are already discussing the eventual possibility of it being able to recognize (and track) specific faces. The ability to scan and make images searchable will have a profound effect the net as we know it, however, with all the privacy concerns Google has been raising of late one has to wonder how privacy advocates will react to the news.

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