Of all the features announced during the Galaxy S24 launch event,Circle to Searchseemed like one of the most promising. From Samsung’s ads to Google’s own announcements about bringing it to the Pixel 8 series, the search giant is hyping up Circle to Search as a revolutionary change to how we use our phones and interact with Search. For once, people I know in real life are genuinely excited to try it out, a rarity among new tech features. Can Circle to Search live up to expectations? It depends on how good your memory is.
Circle to Search is easy to use —really easy
A problem with many Google features in the past is that they’ve been hidden away so the average user won’t find them. Google Lens, for example, does almost everything Circle to Search can do, but it is hidden away in the camera or Photos app.
Circle to Search changes all that. The phone has a full-screen popup during setup to tell you all about it, and activating it uses an input people have been using on their phones for over a decade now — holding down the home button or gesture bar. That’s one of the biggest improvements right off the bat: it’s easy to summon Circle to Search, especially if you’ve never swapped your Samsung phone away from using its default navigation menu.
How capable is Circle to Search, exactly?
As the name suggests, the primary use is circling something on your screen and performing a reverse image search through Google. If you’re watching a product review and decide that this particular Optimus Prime collectible must be yours there and then, circling the item will bring up search results, including links to storefronts that sell the item. you’re able to also select and translate text, which will be useful when reading road signs or menus when traveling.
Google Lens is accessible here as well. Once you’ve activated Circle to Search, you may tap the camera icon on the Google Search bar to summon Lens. I’m glad to see Lens isn’t being forgotten, as it’s much faster at getting results for things physically in front of you. Without it, you’d need to take a photo and then perform a Circle to Search on that, which wastes time by comparison. One of my hopes now that it’s more easily accessible is that more people will become aware of Google Lens — it’s something everyone should give a try.
Plenty of the new software features we’ve seen launch over the last year — or Google features in general, really — feel half-baked and janky when they’re first released. While hopeful, that’s what I was expecting to see here, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that isn’t the case. Circle to Search has behaved precisely as I would expect each time I use it. It’s blisteringly fast at finding results, and each interaction with it has been hassle-free.
All this has happened before, and it will all happen again
Maybe I’m being cynical, but I can see the hype around Circle to Search fading with time. It’s not a bad feature — far from it, Circle to Search works better than I could have imagined, and I have no complaints about it. The issue I foresee is how often people will need it. Google has this vision of people constantly searching for products and items they see while scrolling through social media, but I’m not sure that will be as frequent an interaction as Google believes.
Maybe I’m just an outlier, but 90% of my interactions with Circle to Search have been with the search bar. I use text search a lot, and being able to summon a search bar without going to the home screen has saved me a lot of time, and I can see that becoming the case for many users.
We’ve seen that happen before. Android 8.0 Oreo addeda feature called Now on Tap, which could be summoned to your screen by — get this — holding the home button. It would then scan and identify everything on your screen and provide search results based on what it could see. Now on Tap was the primordial Circle to Search. It was slower by comparison and didn’t offer quick access to Google Lens, but it was impressive for the time it came out, with reviewers calling it one of the best things added to Android that year.
When was the last time you even thought about Now on Tap? Google Assistant quickly replaced it, and before Circle to Search was announced, I can’t say it took up any space in my memory the way other forgotten Google features had. When the novelty wears off of Circle to Search, I could see history repeat itself again.
Maybe I’m wrong, and this is the next step in the evolution of how we use Google Search. Whatever happens next, right now, we’re in a good place. If you have a reason to use Circle to Search, it’ll spring into life with a speed and accuracy I wish all Google products possessed, and I hope that it continues to improve.
