Neural networking is a computational model that mimics some of the same architecture used in the brain. Such systems have a series of interconnected neurons which can take information from a variety of sources and are also capable of learning.
The neural network developed by Google was the work of four scientists - Oriol Vinyals, Alexander Toshev, Samy Bengio and Dumitru Erhan.
"A picture may be worth a thousands words," they wrote on the Google Research blog., external
"But sometimes it's the words that are the most useful - so it's important we figure out ways to translate from images to words automatically and accurately."
Two years ago Google researchers created image-recognition software and showed it 10 million images taken from YouTube videos. After three days the programme had taught itself how to pick out pictures of cats.