Google Chrome is working on a feature similar to Android’s Circle to Search: Report

Google Chrome may introduce new artificial intelligence (AI)-powered features for users that can help them easily perform certain tasks in the browser. One of these new features will likely be related to performing visual searches 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, which 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 that is an animation similar to the Circle to Search feature on Android phones. According to videos shared in a series of posts, there will be a dedicated Google Lens button on the Chrome toolbar with this feature.

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 search. Results related to the image or text in the selected area are displayed in a tab on the right side of the screen. This is similar to the Google Lens feature that exists in Chrome, but is expected to be introduced as an improved version, allowing users to perform 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 their Chrome browser. However, Google Chrome engineering director Adriana Porter Felt recently hinted that newer AI-powered features are likely to come to Chrome.

Web page reading, similar to the summarization tools we see in Microsoft’s Copilot and Samsung’s Galaxy AI, could be a feature that Google Chrome’s upcoming AI-integrated features could include alongside the aforementioned search-related feature that may arrive in a future version of Chrome.