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Google's Circle To Search is a Dead-Simple Way To Find What You're Looking For (theverge.com) 43

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
It's hard to think of a more self-explanatory feature than Circle to Search: it does exactly what it sounds like it does. You circle something on your phone screen, tap a button, and voila! A page full of Google search results telling you about the thing you circled. The Verge: The new feature is launching on five phones to start -- the three members of Samsung's brand-new Galaxy S24 series, as well as Google's Pixel 8 and 8 Pro -- before it comes to other "select, premium" Android phones. Well, maybe it does need a little explaining. If the feature sounds familiar, you might be thinking of Google Lens, which is similar. But instead of opening up the Google app, you can use Circle to Search anywhere on your device. Just long-press the home button if you're using three-button navigation -- or the navigation handle if you're using gesture nav -- and it will appear on top of whatever app or screen you're currently using. You can circle, highlight, or tap a subject, including text as well as images.
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Google's Circle To Search is a Dead-Simple Way To Find What You're Looking For More

Google's Circle To Search is a Dead-Simple Way To Find What You're Looking For

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  • thats what it is

  • I actually (Score:5, Insightful)

    by wakeboarder ( 2695839 ) on Wednesday January 17, 2024 @03:26PM (#64167867)
    just want to be able to search for something in quotes, and get what I want. Google doesn't work anymore.

    • Many years back Google switched from a tool that shows you what you want to see, to a tool that makes you look at what they want to show you

      • The hard thing is there isn't a good alternative

        • ChatGPT is already better for many types of queries. We're going to have some form of LLM that's finetuned on your interests and updated nightly, which will be your go-everywhere knowledge engine. It should also have access to your personal deep-web content, like integration into Discord, Instagram, iMessage, etc. The Web is dead anyway. No one really wants to go to random sites, nor will search engines even show those to you. The top 10 sites provide 99% of traffic and are really just frontends for acces

    • Re:I actually (Score:4, Informative)

      by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Wednesday January 17, 2024 @04:09PM (#64168017)

      I just found out today you have to click on the tools setting, then all results and then pick verbatim.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by eriks ( 31863 )

        Wow, I... Uh, how long has that been there? If that turns out to be as useful as I think might be, I might have to eat some crow and go back to using google search instead of DDG. (I just posted a comment on this this story 5 minutes ago about how I'll never go back to google) Google's tracking me and everyone else anyway, but if their search is actually better again, I'm all over that.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Quotes still work for me. I use them often when I get a specific error message.

  • It's like an alternative to right-clicking on something and selecting "search DuckDuckGo for ...".

  • What?! Who wants this? What *I* want is for stupid apps and even WEB PAGES to stop making it impossible to select TEXT (not embedded into an image, mind you, but actual text rendered in an actual font) and then search for it, just because I'm looking at the TEXT on my phone. I guess they think they're "protecting their content" or some such nonsense, like, um, No, they're not. I rarely (but sometimes!) have that issue on an actual computer, but (of course) there, there's always workaround (DOM inspector

    • Sounds like you want this since it would accomplish exactly what you are complaining about.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by eriks ( 31863 )

        But I don't want to circle shit and send it to google so that they can OCR it and spit it back to me as a search result, I want to be able to SELECT THE TEXT!

        I get that this *is* a workaround for unselectable actual text (as well as text in an image) but why is such a stupid workaround necessary? Why isn't text, well, TEXT? Is that not completely stupid? I don't think I'm being unreasonable to call it stupid.

        If you folks think that shit being broken (selecting text!) is "solved" by workarounds like this

        • Umm, whether you circle or highlight the end result is you dragging your finger over the screen and getting what you want. It literally solves the problem you've presented.
    • It would allow you to do that. In fact, with Google Lens you can do that today. Just need to get over your Google hate.

  • Google Maps (Score:3)

    by Baby Duck ( 176251 ) on Wednesday January 17, 2024 @04:34PM (#64168139) Homepage
    Google Maps needs something like this. Stop making the street names on the roads static like it's still a paper map. You're a dynamic screen, dammit. For every road you display, tell me the name of the road. Stop making me scroll 20 screen lengths just to find the name ... and then I have to scroll 20 more to get back to where I was!

    • Google Maps needs something like this. Stop making the street names on the roads static like it's still a paper map. You're a dynamic screen, dammit. For every road you display, tell me the name of the road. Stop making me scroll 20 screen lengths just to find the name ... and then I have to scroll 20 more to get back to where I was!

      This is high on my list of examples of utterly incomprehensible software choices.
      A street map is only a street map if it shows the names of the streets. Without the names of the streets it's not a street map, it's a Mondrian painting.
      I get that at some zoom levels it would be crowded to show three dozen street names on a 5" phone screen. But I do not get the number of times I've zoomed into a half-mile area of a residential development with only 6-10 streets on screen, yet only one or two of them show names

  • "Circle a word and tap to do something with it" was the primary interface for context on Apple Newtons back in the day. While we didn't have always-online internet search (obviously), that was how you sent it off for spell-checking or the proto-Apple Data Detector logic that would do things like add appointments, set a reminder, or all the other stuff that Siri does nowadays.

    Everything old is new again.

    • I think that quote should become "Everything old becomes new again as soon the patent expires".

      I've noticed a bunch of stuff I did 25 years ago when I was working in Silicon Valley showing up all around the place lately.

  • Does that mean that if I type out a query on my phone, circle it, and initiate a search, I'll be back to the old days when Google honoured my search syntax and responded with relevant results? No? I thought not.

    The fact that this parlour trick passes as 'innovation' says a lot about how far Google has fallen.

  • Must one actually be slack-jawed and drooling to use "circle to search" or is that just implied?

  • I am always out in the woods and finding interesting plants/fungi/insects and I frequently use google lens to aid in figuring out what I am looking at, this will make it a smidge smoother.

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