More on Google Lens and object identification

 I've written before about my experiences with Google Lens as a tool to identify nineteenth century artefacts.

Earlier this week I had quite a productive day at Lake View, working on a collection of nineteenth century surgical instruments.

Most of them I photographed using my cheap Temu lightbox which I powered from a powerbank to save trailing extension cables everywhere, which worked well as a solution

Working on the instruments had its problems. I didn’t know what some of the instruments were, or what they were called, so when I didn’t recognise them I used Google Lens to help identify them, with mixed results.

Specialised, unique looking instruments such as a fistula director or a nineteenth century tonsil cutting tool were easy to identify with the aid of Google Lens, often turning up examples in the collection of the UK Science museum, but more generic looking items, such as a tubular surgical probe, were sometimes  mistaken for car fuel system components, and this I think shows a problem with Google Lens - when you are trying to identify something fairly unique it’s quite good, as there are not a lot of possibilities, but where your object looks like a lot of similar looking more commonly searched for objects the results tend to be weighted towards the more common objects.

Nothing wrong with that, in fact in most cases it’s what you would expect the application to do - give you the most common result, but it does mean that when you review the results of the search you should do so critically ...