Google Lens Functionality Coming to Images in Search

It was the service that really put Google on the map.

Besides making this new Discover page available through the app on mobile phones, users who open their browser to the default google.com homepage will find the Discover feed is served up there as well on mobile devices.

Google also announced that its feed now has over 800 million users, and has led to 2.5X more traffic to publishers in the last one year. “And we’re still dedicated first and foremost to the user, to building products for everyone”, said Google on the occasion. Previously a stand alone app, Google Lens uses AI to identify the contents of a picture without needing words to figure out what it is. In addition to the new look, Google is also promising better discovery of content within Discover.

The new search engine will work like Google Scholar, the company’s popular search engine for academic studies and reports.

The rollout for the new Discover feed is scheduled to be US-only and in English and Spanish for now, though Google says they “will expand to more languages and countries soon”.

Users will also be able to customize it up to some extent. Starting this week, when you view an individual image, you’ll be able to see more context about it via captions included from the title of the site containing it. Along with the new name comes a redesign that should look familiar with the recent Material Theme updates. But wait, it is not going to be anything like your social platform stories. A new “featured videos” card for automatically played results will also appear for some queries. If you come across something in Discover that you particularly like or dislike, you can now express that sentiment with a toggle in the corner of the card.

After completely rebranding Google Feed, it’s Google Images’ turn to get a makeover.

Lastly, they are bringing Google Lens to Google Images, which analyzes images and finds objects of interest within them. The Images ranking algorithm has changed as well, which will now take the quality and relevance of pictures into consideration as well as the page the photo can be found on. It will even let you crop images straight away without having to use snipping tool for it. The company said “evergreen” pieces that aren’t new will also be shown if they’re relevant to the user.