When something grabs your interest (like these adorable dog goggles), it can be disruptive to stop what you’re doing and use another app or browser to start searching for information. But now, whether you’re texting friends, browsing social media or watching a video, you can search what’s on your screen right when your curiosity strikes. And as we’ve shared, Search and Shopping ads will continue to appear in dedicated ad slots throughout the results page.

Circle to Search is launching globally on select premium Android smartphones on January 31, starting with the Pixel 8, the Pixel 8 Pro and the new Samung Galaxy S24 series.

Point your camera, ask a question, get help from AI

In 2022, we pioneered multisearch in Lens as a new way to search multimodally, with both images and text. Since it launched, multisearch has been best for refining visual queries — like searching for a photo of red sneakers with Lens and adding the word “blue” to find them in your preferred color. But now, thanks to our recent breakthroughs in generative AI, multisearch makes exploring the world easier than ever before.

Starting today, when you point your camera (or upload a photo or screenshot) and ask a question using the Google app, the new multisearch experience will show results with AI-powered insights that go beyond just visual matches. This gives you the ability to ask more complex or nuanced questions about what you see, and quickly find and understand key information.

For example, imagine you’re at a yard sale and you come across an unfamiliar board game. There’s no box or instructions, so immediately some questions spring to mind: What is this game and how is it played? This is where the new multisearch experience can help.

Just take a picture of the game, add your question (“How do you play this?”), and you’ll get an AI-powered overview that brings together the most relevant information from across the web. This way, you can quickly find out what the game is called and how to win. And with the AI-powered overview, it’s easy to dig deeper with supporting links and get all the details.