Through the Google Lens feature, Chrome on the Android side has realized the ability to extract text and objects from pictures and perform related searches. In the Chrome 94 Beta version released today, Google began testing the Lens image search feature on Windows and Linux platforms.
Google Lens is based on a smartphone application camera now also been integrated into Google, Google Photos application. With this function, you can search for what you see. For example, if you encounter an animal or plant that you don’t recognize, take a picture and Google Lens will help you identify it. The lens can also OCR recognize handwritten and printed text in a picture and convert it into a digital version for saving and sending.
Lens uses computer vision, machine learning, and Google’s knowledge graph to convert what people see in the physical world into a visual search box. So far, Lens has used smartphone cameras and artificial intelligence technology to do these things, and Google is bringing Lens screen search to the Chrome browser on the desktop.
To use the Google Lens function on the desktop, you need to enable the experimental Flag:
- Download and install the latest Chrome Beta version
- Click the experiment icon on the toolbar or visit chrome://flags
- Find Search your Screen with Google Lens
- Select Enable and restart the browser
How to search using Google Lens
- Right-click anywhere on the screen and select Search a part of the page with Google Lens
- Drag the mouse on the screen to create an area for searching. Google Lens will perform an image search and display the results in a new tab. For example, when we selected the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 3 image as the area in the YouTube video, Lens generated the correct result for it. Take a look at the screenshot above.
- Here, the lens search with artificial intelligence correctly found the phone, and the Top Match and Visual Match of the Samsung Flip 3 phone are displayed on the result page. If you are not satisfied, you can try the Google image search option at the bottom.
- Google calls this function Lens Area Search and encourages users to use this tool when browsing the web and shopping with the Chrome browser. You should choose YouTube videos, static images, and GIFs to test this feature.
