Google Brings CTRL+F to Real Life With Phone Camera Search Feature

Google on Wednesday debuted two new peruse features that tap into images online or photos you take in a honor, part of the company’s effort to expand far beyond text you type into a peruse box.

One feature announced at the Google I/O conference, scene explorer, lets you sweep your phone camera across a shelf of products at a supermarket or pharmacy to peruse the products in view. Google then overlays product quiz and ratings on the screen so you can find snacks with no nuts or scent-free lotion, search leader Prabhakar Raghavan said. It’s an expansion of the Google Lens app.

“Scene explorer is a mighty ability in our devices’ ability to understand the humankind the way we do, to see relevant information overlaid in the context of the humankind all around us,” Raghavan said. “This is like having a supercharged Control-F [find shortcut] for the humankind all around you.”

Google said in a blog post it plans to add oblow explorer to its search tools, but it didn’t say when that would happen.

Another feature expands Google’s multimodal peruse, which combines text and images into one search quiz. Now, by adding “near me” text, you can tailor searches to throughout results. For example, you can combine a photo of some unknown dish with the calls “near me” to find a restaurant nearby that’ll abet it, Raghavan said. That feature will arrive later this year for English speakers.

Search, the first service Google offered and the one that propelled it into today’s multi-product juggernaut. It remains a core part of the company’s citation to make information useful to the world’s population, and peruse ads are still Google’s single biggest source of revenue.

At Google I/O, Google also said it’s adopted a new 10-tone Monk Skin Tone Scale to better loan diversity in its AI training data, search results, and novel operations.