They used to say “you can’t judge a book by its cover.” And while that may still be true, you can certainly find out a lot more about it, just by taking a picture of its cover using the award-winning kooaba visual search app on your Nokia device. In fact, kooaba can be used to reveal loads of extra information about various media products, like books, CDs, DVDs, video games and more.

Basically, if you can take a picture of the product, in all likelihood, kooaba, from the Swiss company of the same name, will be able to provide you with more information about it. And, this isn’t just a fancy bar code reader here. The app is using images from the covers of the media, like a book cover, or the front of a CD, and pulling up information that can be found online. And it does all of this in a very easy-to-follow user interface, and even better – as long as you have a fast data connection – it retrieves the information for you in a hurry.

When you first start the app, it invites you to get started right away, as you can see from the screenshot below.

You simply take a picture of whatever it is that you need more information about, and within seconds it displays results of what it thinks you’re interested in. Interestingly, the picture you take doesn’t even need to be completely clear or in focus for the app to do its job. I tried to fill the screen with the stuff I took pictures of, and in doing so, I was quite close up to those objects.

I thought I might have a stumper right away, choosing a CD boxed set of a reading of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit that we had bought a long time ago, thinking about diversions for long car rides. Well, I was wrong. The kooaba app pulled up two results, and one of them was exactly the same as the boxed set sitting on our dining table. (The second result in the image below shows the product I had decided to search.)

OK, technically, kooaba is calling the result a book, even though I think of it as a set of CDs – some might call it an audio book, I suppose.

When you click through on the result, you then see an assortment of options for additional information about the specific media product that you have searched. The results include links to Wikipedia, search with Google or Yahoo, as well as links to eBay.

So suppose you are out shopping, and you see a product that you’re interested in, you could use kooaba to quickly do a search for some price comparison information. Handy, right?

Subsequent attempts to fool the app were quickly defeated. One book that I searched for even brought up translated versions of the same thing, so clearly the repository of information that kooaba uses as a point of reference is chock full of data. (As it happens, kooaba claims to have 10 million items in their database!)

If you want, you can also register with kooaba – although this is optional – and keep a record of your searches online. This information can be shared with others, or perhaps you simply want to use it as a way to keep online records of your personal media collection.

The kooaba app itself is a small file – less than 0.25 MB in size. One thing to note, though, is that kooaba was developed using software called Qt, and this will require a one-time installation of supporting files (described as “components” when you view the listing for kooaba in Ovi Store), which are quite large (up to 12 MB). The nice part is, once you have installed these components, you will have them for use with other apps based on Qt that you might download in the future.

The kooaba visual search app is free to download in Ovi Store.

More information is available on the kooaba website.