Chrome may soon get a feature like Android’s Circle to Search

Google may introduce new features powered by artificial intelligence (AI) for Chrome users that can help them perform certain tasks more 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 recently surfaced online suggests that Chrome is likely to bring a version of Google’s Circle to Search feature that arrived with the Samsung Galaxy S24 series earlier this year 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 that is an animation, similar to the circle to search feature on Android phones. According to the video shared in the series of posts, along 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 part of the screen they want to view. Results related to the image or text in the selected area appear in a tab on the right side of the screen. It is similar to the Google Lens feature present in Chrome, but it is expected to be introduced as an improved version, which will allow users to search by selecting elements on the screen.

Google has not yet officially confirmed that such a feature is being developed for the desktop version of its Chrome browser. However, Google Chrome engineering director Adriana Porter Felt recently hinted that new AI-supported features are likely to come to Chrome.

Reading webpages, similar to the summary tool we see in Microsoft’s Copilot and Samsung’s Galaxy AI, could be a feature that could be included in Google Chrome’s AI-integrated upcoming features along with the above search-related feature. Which may come in a future version of Chrome.