Google integrates its advanced image recognition and search technology, Google Lens, directly into the page's search bar.
Google is adding Lens image search directly to its homepage, allowing users to access the advanced image recognition tool right from the search bar. The search giant first announced Google Lens at I/O 2017 and has since integrated it into many of its services, including Google Photos, Chrome , and more. Now, as first noted by 9to5Google, the company is adding the visual search tool to the Google homepage.
The change is significant, according to Rajan Patel , Google ’s vice president of engineering , who is responsible for Search and Lens. In a tweet on Tuesday, Patel noted that Google’s homepage doesn’t change often, but that the company wanted to expand the way users can ask questions. On the surface, Google’s homepage is pretty similar to what it was years ago, so any addition is notable.
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“The Google homepage doesn’t change often, but today it did,” Patel. “We’re always working to expand the types of questions you can ask and improve how we answer them. Now you can easily ask visual questions from your homepage.”
Google Images has been letting you search for similar-looking images for a while now, but Lens goes way beyond that. It also tries to give you information about what's in the image. If you scan an image, Google will do its best to tell you what it contains, giving you a bunch of images you can use to cross-reference.
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Once you click the Lens button, the page will ask you to upload an image or paste the URL of an image. After you do that, you'll see a Lens results page. Lens will show you information about the photo, shopping results for the products shown, and more. Lens can also identify plant or animal species. You can also put in an image with text, which Lens will digitize and translate if it's in a foreign language. If you scan a QR code, it will give you information about it. Google also gives you a link to do a reverse image search to find out where it came from. The results page will look familiar to people who are used to Google Lens.
Google is working to better integrate the visual search tools from Google Lens into its other products, and by adding it directly to its homepage, it introduces the tool to people who may not have known about it or simply haven't tried it yet.
Source: techcrunch.com
