Google last night announced the launch of Google Shopper, a new app for Android that puts power shopping and searching at the users' fingertips.

The biggest draw of Google Shopper is that it lets users search for items to purchase by simply photographing the item. Google says this will work with the covers on books, CDs, DVDs, and video games. Users can also just photograph the item's barcode or search by voice.

As an added bonus, Google Shopper already features the ability to star key items or to scroll through search history.

This kind of technology has already been available, and not just for Android users. For example, ShopSavvy, which is available for free on iPhone and Android platforms (with Nokia support coming soon), has for some time let users search for items to purchase by photographing a barcode. The advantage of Google Shopper is that it lets users also just take a picture of the actual item to perform a search.

Google has been really big on augmented reality lately.

Yesterday we reported how Google had commenced work on a significant upgrade to its Goggles application so that users could photograph text in some language, upload the photo to Google, and receive in return the text translated to some other language. Right now, the app only works with German-to-English, but, of course, Google's long-term ambition is to allow users to translate from any of the 52 languages offered by Google Translate to any other.

Google Goggles is still only available exclusively for Android devices running Android 1.6 and above. Though Google confirmed in early December that Goggles would soon be coming to other devices, like the iPhone, there's no word yet on whether Google Shopper will also be ported.

In fact, because of the similarity between the two technologies, one might even stop and wonder why Google does not simply integrate Google Shopper directly into Goggles.