What if all of those laborious hours you have spent taking photos of homes, landmarks, landscapes and sunsets in your area were a waste of time? And what if I told you that you should have spent your time taking photos of street signs, "For Sale" lawn signs, address placards, and descriptive signage in your community instead? As crazy as it may seem, this might need to be your focus over the course of the next year or so as Google has recently filed a patent on Recognizing Text in Images. Seems pretty unbelievable right? Well, we are talking about Google here – the same company that is working on recognizing relevant information throgh audio files for its future search results. Here is the Abstract from the WIPO describing this, "Methods, systems, and apparatus including computer program products for using extracted image text are provided. In one implementation, a computer-implemented method is provided. The method includes receiving an input of one or more image search terms and identifying keywords from the received one or more image search terms. The method also includes searching a collection of keywords including keywords extracted from image text, retrieving an image associated with extracted image text corresponding to one or more of the image search terms, and presenting the image." This would be a pretty outstanding development for Google and the future of search results as they gradually move towards Universal Search. This move towards a 2.0 version of Google would of course trickle down to all industry and market segments – in this case Real Estate. With the ever increasing importance of establishing your Real Estate Niche, this push of Google’s to expand their algorithms to recognizing text in images would only solidify the effectiveness of having everything on your real estate site being extremely targeted to what you specialize in. If you specialize in "green real estate" in your community then go out and take some photos of popular street signs that course throughout "green" developed neighborhoods. The whole point is that Google will eventually pick up the text in these images and work them into relevant search results as queries become more and more specific. What are your thoughts on this patent filing? Are you going to go out and take new photos so you will be the first to have these or are you going to wait for everyone else to do so first?