Google Lens was launched back in 2017 as a Pixel-exclusive feature, and it made it to all Android and iOS devices a few months later, in 2018, via Google Photos. In the meantime, the service has grown and grown, and apparently, it’s so grown up now that Google feels like it belongs on its home page.
To quote Rajan Patel, Google’s VP of Engineering for Search, Image Search, and Lens, it’s not often that the Google homepage changes. And so, when it does, it’s a pretty big deal. Starting today the Google Lens icon proudly gets to sit alongside the microphone inside the search box on Google.com.
If you hit the Lens icon, you’ll get what you see in the screenshot above. You can drag and drop any image, or upload a file, or paste an image link. Once you do that, you’ll get visual matches for your image from across the web, as well as the ability to extract (and translate) text.
The prominent real estate that the Lens icon now occupies may help more people realize that they can search visually on Google – the feature was always there, but we’d wager not very discoverable. Only time will tell if that changes from this point on.
