Search isn"t just about text anymore. At the Cebit trade show in Germany, Vodafone is demonstrating Otello, a search engine that uses images as input.
Instead of entering a word or phrase users send pictures via MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) from their mobile phones.
The picture can be anything from a historical building to a CD cover, according to Vodafone. Otello then returns information relevant to the picture to the mobile phone, just like a normal search engine.
Vodafone"s reasoning behind image search is that it"s more convenient to take a picture than to enter search terms with a phone that lacks a normal keyboard.