Engadget recently posted an interesting article about Vodafone’s new Otello search engine, which uses images rather than text to track down information. Showcased at CeBIT, the search engine simply uses images as input, allowing users to capture a picture of anything—a landmark, library book, DVD case, professor, etc.—and Otello “returns information relevant to the picture to the mobile phone.”

Engadget reports that Vodafone is expected to conduct a trial with German paper Bild in which readers can “find out more about specially-marked articles by photographing them with their mobile’s camera and sending the image to [the aforementioned paper].” Unfortunately, the carrier is being tight-lipped with its plans for Otello beyond the trial, but if this stuff functions as advertised, Engadget suggest that it won’t remain a secret for long.

A visual search engine of this sort could have a multitude of educational uses. For example, what if it was combined with optical character recognition (ORC) to scan printed text directly into word processing software for editing? Of course speculation concerning the educational potentiality of this search engine could go on forever. Any other interesting ideas?