SEARCH SMARTER USING GOOGLE LENS
Search the web visually
Google is increasingly promoting its AI tool Google Lens as an innovative new way to search the web. Google Lens is built into the Camera app on most Android phones, and the Google Photos app for Android and IOS, letting you identify the subjects of pictures you take and look up information about them. But it’s the recent integration of Lens with the Google search engine on desktop and mobile devices that will prove most beneficial to web users. It lets you search using images rather than words and gives you better results than than the old ‘reverse-image search’ option in Google Images.
To search with Google Lens through the Google website, click the ‘Search by image’ icon (a camera with Google colours) in the search box and either drag an image into the box that opens or click ‘upload a file’ (see screenshot above right) to select a picture from your hard drive. You can also enter the URL of an online image into the ‘Paste image link box’ and click Search.
Google Lens will use machine learning to scan the image and open a web page identifying its subject and displaying ‘Visual matches’ ( 1 in our screenshot below). These let you click through to sites containing related information, so you can learn more about the subject. Click the ‘Find image source’ button 2 to see pages that feature the original picture.
Google Lens also lets you extract and search for text that appears in images by clicking the Text button 3 , then either selecting the words you want to look up or clicking ‘Select all text’. Search results containing matching or similar text will appear on the right-hand side of the page. If the text is in another language, click the Translate button 4 to see it in English.
On your phone or tablet, tap the Google Lens icon in the Google app or on Google’s mobile site to select a screenshot or photo from your library, or take a picture with your camera. As well as identifying the subject and looking up and translating text, Lens can detect the image’s location (or at least suggest similar places), scan barcodes to find products, provide recipes for photos of food, and much more.
Combine images and text in searches
Google recently introduced a feature called ‘multisearch’, which lets you combine images and text in a single search query to get more relevant results.
To use multisearch, open the Google app on your Android or IOS device and tap the Google Lens icon in the search box. Press ‘Search with your camera’ to take a photo of an item, or select a screenshot or image from your library, and Lens will display visual matches. Swipe up and tap the ‘Add to your search’ button (see screenshot above right) then enter a text query and your image results will be filtered accordingly. Tap the text filter to edit or delete it and try a different search. You can use the term ‘near me’ to see locally relevant results.
Google says multisearch is particularly handy for shopping searches, allowing you to search for a picture of a product, then use a text filter to view a different colour, shape or brand (www.snipca. com/45067). It can also be used to find information about an object, such as the manual for a phone or the history of an old building.
Search with Google Lens in Chrome
Google has now integrated Lens with Chrome so you can look up images on web pages to learn more about them. Simply right-click a picture on a page and choose ‘Search with Google’ to open Google Lens in the browser’s side panel. As well as identifying the subject, Lens lets you see other pages that feature the image, explore visual matches and use its Text and Translate options.
You need to have Google set as Chrome’s default search engine for the new feature to work. If it opens Google Images instead of Lens, type chrome:flags into the browser’s address bar, press Enter and find the entry Enable Lens features in Chrome. Select ‘Enabled With Side Panel’ in the dropdown menu (see screenshot below) and relaunch Chrome.