Google Labs has a hard-earned reputation for churning out some of the world’s most innovative software thanks to releases such as Google Earth, Google Sky Map and the Android App Inventor, so for an app to stand out amid such distinguished company it’s got to impress. Step forward Google Goggles.

This free tool, which runs on phones equipped with Android 1.6 and above, is a visual search engine that masks its incredible sophistication with a simple premise: take a picture of something and it’ll tell you what it is.

It’s that easy. Take a picture of almost anything – Google says text, artwork, places, books and logos work best – and the software runs a futuristic blue film across the image, scanning it for familiar features.

A few seconds later, you’re presented with the results. Scanning a book served up a price comparison, a preview, and regular Google search results with links to Amazon and Wikipedia. It even provided links to the author’s other titles. Goggles works with landmarks, too: a quick snap of Big Ben returned a link to the famous clock’s Wikipedia page.

It works just as well with words, too. The text recognition software read a business card with ease, successfully loading my phone number, name and address. Goggles also provides a link to add the person to your contacts, send them an email or navigate to any URL that’s written on the card.

This text recognition comes into play with foreign languages, too: we pointed Goggles at the lyrics of famous French tune La Vie en Rose and the app scanned the image, identified the language and made a pretty decent fist of translating the text. Not bad for a free app, and something that could prove invaluable for tourists and befuddled journalists alike.

A couple of other features are included to help improve accuracy. It’s possible to crop the area that the app will use for its search, so you can avoid anything in the background of your image skewing results, and every search can be rated, with this information presumably helping to refine the undoubtedly powerful algorithms powering Goggles. Any pictures you take can be discarded or saved to your phone, so it’s easy to refer back to previous searches.

It’s certainly one of the most impressive developments to emerge from Google Labs, and has found a home on my phone partly because it’s incredibly useful and partly because it makes people drool when they see it in action.

Want more great Android apps? Then check out our previous Apps of the Week or read our 36 best Android apps feature