Google Chrome Working on Feature Similar to Circle to Search on Android: Report

Google Chrome could introduce new features powered by artificial intelligence (AI) to users that could help them perform certain tasks easily on the browser. One of these new features is likely to be related to performing visual lookups while browsing the web. New information that has recently surfaced online suggests that Chrome is likely to bring a version of Google's Circle to Search feature that arrived earlier this year with the Samsung Galaxy S24 series and is available on some Android smartphones.

X (formerly Twitter) user @Leopeva64 shared in a series of posts that Google Chrome is testing a new Lens UI element which is an animation, similar to the Circle to Search feature on Android phones. As per to videos shared in a series of posts, with this feature, there will be a dedicated Google Lens button in the toolbar on Chrome.

When the new Google Lens button is selected, a search icon appears next to the cursor and users can drag and select the portion of the screen they want to look up. The results related to the image or text in the selected area appear in a tab on the right side of the screen. This is similar to the Google Lens feature existing in Chrome, but it is expected to be presented as an improved version, allowing users to conduct searches by selecting elements on the screen.

Google is yet to officially confirm that such a feature is in development for the desktop version of its Chrome browser. However, Google Chrome Director of Engineering Adriana Porter Felt recently hinted that newer AI-backed features are likely to come to Chrome. 

Reading webpages, similar to summarisation tools that we see in Microsoft's Copilot and Samsung's Galaxy AI, could be a feature that Google Chrome's AI-integrated upcoming features could include alongside the aforementioned Search-related feature, that could arrive on a future version of Chrome.