Google claims that their recent acquisition of Neven Vision’s image recognition software will make Picasa better at organizing your vacation images and so on. While rather nifty from a technological point of view, this doesn’t seem all that practical or useful.

What’s got me all hot is the idea of Google Image Search being able to employ similar techniques. I use Image Search frequently, but far too often the results are poor because of bad file naming practices or because sites hosting images are obviously not going to be able to textually describe everything that occurs or exists in a given image. Being able to search within the pixels of all the indexable images on the net would be an amazing achievement.

Of course, the privacy issues that such a service could raise are probably giving some privacy activists cold sweats, but what doesn’t these days?