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After being in development for months, it looks like a version of Android’s Circle to Search is coming to the desktop via the Chrome browser. At the moment, it seems to be taking a couple different forms on Windows/MacOS/Linux versus ChromeOS, but the end result is the same: you’ll soon be able to make a click or two and highlight stuff in any Chrome tab that you want to find more information on.
This has been spotted by a few outlets in Chrome and ChromeOS 128 Beta (we saw it over on 9to5 Google), meaning there’s a legit chance we’ll see it arrive in Chrome 128 Stable in mid-August and ChromeOS 128 in very early September. These sorts of features don’t always end up showing up in the same Stable builds as we see in the Beta or Developer Channels, so we’ll just have to wait on that.
What Chrome’s Circle To Search looks like
The idea behind all of this is the same as you see on your Android phone. If there’s something on screen you want more information on, just activate Google Lens, highlight the content, and let Google’s AI/ML do the work for you. It’s convenient enough on Android phones already, and I think it might be even more so on the desktop. Here’s a quick video of it in action:
As you can see, on ChromeOS, you’ll simply hit the lens icon in the URL bar (you can choose for it to be located in a few spots when you enable the flag), drag your mouse cursor to highlight something, and get a search result instantly. It can understand text, photos, and other content, so the sky’s the limit with what you can actually use this tool for.
For Windows/MacOS/Linux, the option is in the 3-dot overflow menu for now, but I could see this changing before it rolls out to stable. Again, as stated above, there are a few options on where the Lens button is located when you turn on the flag for this in Chrome or ChromeOS Beta (chrome://flags/#enable-lens-overlay): you can can either put it in the URL bar, up in your pinned shortcuts, or in the overflow menu.
And if you don’t want to move to Beta to test this out, I feel quite certain we’ll see this hit the Stable channels of both Chrome and ChromeOS pretty soon. A little patience may save you needing to go through any additional steps to try all this out, so if you are less experimental by nature, I’d just hold off a bit. Either way, this is a pretty awesome feature that all Chrome users will soon enjoy!
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