Google has announced a clutch of new AI-powered features have begun rolling out to users of Chrome on Windows, macOS, and —for once!— Linux.
Chrome’s Vice President Parisa Tabriz unveiled the trio of AI features, which are all powered by the latest Google Gemini AI models, on The Keyword blog today, saying: –
We’re making it even easier to search what you see with the power of Google Lens, compare products across multiple tabs and rediscover sites from your browser history, whether you’re at home or at work.
Google’s Parisa Tabriz
As of writing only one of these features (Google Lens) is present and enabled in the Google Chrome 127 release on my Ubuntu installed. The rest, Google say, will be phased in over the coming weeks, first to users in the USA, and then elsewhere.
For a bit more on these AI-additions, and if they’re going to make your web browsing experience easier or just get in the way, keep reading…
Google Lens for Visual Search
I’d wager you’ve heard of Google Lens before, or even used it on Android or via Google Images (where it’s handy for reverse image searching).
I recently used Google Lens to track down a dope jumper I saw a schlep on TV wearing (alas, once I found out who made it and how much it cost, I nope’d out).
That was handy since text-based Google Search is increasingly useless.
Enter “mens jacquard jumper with bear on” and get a sea of irrelevant Shein, eBay, and Etsy shopping links to regular jumpers, most with no animal on, plus a glut of generic AI slop, opportune Pinterest links that sound a match but send you on a link loop safari to learn they’re not.
So yeah – sometimes searching what you see, not what you say, can be quicker.
Google Lens can solve mathematical equations and translate text from one language to another – so it’s not just an aid for inarticulate searchers.
Google Chrome 127 makes it possible to perform a visual search for anything you see on a web page, be it in a YouTube video, a social media post, or a dorky Linux blog like this. Click the (new) Google Lens icon in the address bar, draw a selection box over the item of interest, and bam.
Tab Compare & Natural Language Search
Shopping for something online? Chances are it’ll involve a lot of open tabs as you compare models, prices, etc. across multiple sites. A lot of tabs, a lot of jumping between them, and a lot of short-term memory usage.
Chrome wants to help with a new ‘Tab Compare’ feature. This uses AI to pull out the essential data from those tabs and generate a comparison table giving you an overview of it. Assuming the AI can actually extract the right info and nuances, that could be real handy.
The other feature is conversational browser history search. How good this will be remains to be seen. In theory, you can say something like “What film did I read about last week?” for AI to pull up the relevant match from your browser history and answer you.
I’m interested to see how “smart” this ends up being.
Say I read a bunch of reviews about 1980s film The Last Star Fighter last week (cos I did). But I also watched the trailer on YouTube, read Reddit posts comparing the 4K remaster with the original Blu-Ray release, and opened a ton of shopping links to try and find it cheap.
It’d be sweet if this ‘natural language’ search interface was actually cognisant of the history to be able to answer specific questions about my history, and not just offer up a matching result based on keyword (which is how this seems to work from Google’s screenshots).
I’d like to ask “what was the cheapest price I saw that 1980s film for last week?” and have it tell me the cheapest; or ask “which Star Fighter blu-ray review mentioned the best picture quality?” — now THAT would be a time saver.
Don’t like the thought of AI probing your browsing history? Google says this will be an optional feature that can be turned on/off at any time, and never probes data from incognito sessions.
Want to try it? Eh…
Only enhanced visual search is available in Chrome 127 (in the UK, at the time of writing). Google says the tab comparison and natural-language history search features will be released in stages over “the next few weeks, starting in the United States.”
If you already have Google Chrome installed on Ubuntu, you should have the v127 update already (if you haven’t installed any updates for a while, it’ll be waiting to install).
Are these things you’d use? Let me know in the comments!