Google Lens is an immensely powerful image recognition tool that lets you visually search the world around you. You can reverse search images, identify plants and animals, scan codes, extract and translate text, and a lot more. Originally limited to smartphones, Google expanded this powerful tool to the desktop via the Chrome browser integration last year. And soon it will be integrated into the Google Search bar on the desktop.
Currently, Google Lens on the desktop can be accessed from Chrome’s context menu. But as spotted by 9to5Google, Google is adding the Google Lens shortcut in the Google Search bar on the desktop. Users who have received the feature as part of A/B testing are seeing a colorful Google Lens icon appearing in the search box right next to the microphone button. When you tap on the Lens icon, it brings up an image picker window. From there, you can drag and drop or manually upload an image to search with Google Lens. Your uploaded images will be shown on the left side while relevant search results appear on the right side. Just like the mobile version, the tool will also let you crop or focus on a specific portion of the image.
The Lens shortcut in Google Search hasn’t rolled out widely on the desktop. Google Chrome for Android already has Google Lens integrated into the search bar so bringing it to the desktop version comes as a natural expansion.
Google is also planning to bring an improved Google Lens experience to the desktop that will let users see search results in the same tab. Right now, when you look up an image with Google Lens, results open up in a new browser tab.