Google is rolling out three new features for Chrome starting today. The excellent Google Lens image search is now more prominent in Chrome, and there are new tab and history organizational features.
There’s now a dedicated button for Google Lens rolling out in the address bar, allowing you to select anything in a page and search for matching results. That includes text, a currently playing video, images, or anything else you see. Chrome already had a Lens search in the right-click context menu for images, but now you can use Google Lens for everything in Chrome. For example, you could select a plant or a landmark in a YouTube video to learn more about it.
Google said in a blog post, “After you make a selection, you’ll see visual matches and results in the side panel. You can then use multisearch to refine your search by color, brand or another detail, or you can ask follow up questions to dive deeper into a topic. Depending on your question, you might get an AI Overview response that brings together the most relevant information from across the web.”
The new functionality is more like the “Circle to Search” feature that first rolled out on Android phones earlier this year, with the ability to select anything on the phone’s screen. A more limited version is available in the Google app on iPhone and iPad.
Google is also rolling out a more conversational search for your browsing history. You can type in phrases like “Wha was that ice cream shop I looked at last week?” and receive relevant answers. Google says it’s an optional feature and “you can easily turn it on or off in your settings,” but doesn’t mention if it will be enabled by default. It also doesn’t include data from incognito mode, since that mode doesn’t save pages to your browsing history.
Finally, Chrome is adding a feature for comparing products across multiple tabs, called Tab compare. It will suggest a comparison table with details like specifications, features, price, and ratings, as an alternative between jumping back and forth between tabs.
Google Lens is rolling out over “the next few days,” while the browsing history search and Tab compare will start arriving “in the coming weeks.”
Source: Google
