With Tuesday’s announced purchase of Neven Vision, Google has positioned itself one step closer to creating an indexable visual simulacrum of reality on the Web. And though early estimates suggest that Google’s acquisition of the biometric and photo recognition company has accelerated the search giant’s projected deadline for parsing and cataloguing the entire breadth of experience by half a generation, luckily for the paranoid among us, the announcement represents a mere molecule on the pin of sweat and ingenuity it will take to render the full breadth of what we see and ever have seen anyone’s mere mouse click away.And yet where was I after the Chicago Bulls completed their second three-peat, having blacked out wandering Grant Park only to find myself in Wisconsin at the Kenosha dog track the next day with a half-eaten bratwurst in hand? Who was the girl dressed as Agent Scully at the Halloween party when I threw up inside the cardboard Sylvia Plath oven I had fashioned over my head before falling down the stairs and ripping my dress? Was that a person or a tree I was yelling at that time I fell off that bike I, well, borrowed from the PX just outside Frankfurt, Germany, in 1997? And so on. Perhaps one day, with a world’s worth of social networking and a few choice keystrokes, I’ll find out. In the meantime, Search Engine Journal provides some intriguing insights into the possibilities this deal presents, annotating a number of the image-based patents Neven Vision holds, including an image-based inquiry system and a search engine that tap the camera capabilities of mobile phones, as well as an image-based biometric system for identifying individuals , requiring a “single digital image depicting a human face as source data.” Technology Industry