Credit: https://9to5google.com/2019/05/21/google-lens-revamp/
Google is now rolling out a revamped Lens—and it comes with five new modes including Dining, Shopping, Text, Translate and Auto. The new modes, according to 9to5google, can be accessed via Google Assistant and Google Photos; but only a few people can access them for now.
The Shopping mode come in very handy when you are in a mall. With it, you can scan barcodes or automatically recognize items like furniture or clothing to check them out online. The Dining mode, just as it sounds, comes very handy when you could do with some tips when you are in a restaurant.
The Text mode allows you to point Lens to any text in order to copy it. This addition will further make Lens more useful as it will come in handy not just when it comes to searching by image, but by text too.
All newly added shopping modes appear at the bottom of the screen as carousel, while a shutter button freezes the image to start automatic recognition. At the top right corner of your screen is an icon that lets you pick an existing image from your phone’s gallery to have it analyzed.
To improve on the quality of results you get, a new cropping feature has now been added to Lens. This becomes necessary so you can crop or specify the exact portion of the screen or image for Lens to analyze—it helps to get better targeted results.
Still on Google, Search results on mobile will soon start displaying a website’s icon as well as well as name atop the title of the specific page you are searching for. The design is expected to begin rolling out to users on mobile in the next couple of days. A Google spokesperson said the update will be made available first on mobile before web and the app itself.
From what we have seen of the new design so far, Search on mobile now looks pretty much like a news feed. The fact that users will now start seeing sources of sites will further add some credibility to the result being displayed. In this era of fake news, adding sources makes to search result makes a lot of sense.
“As we continue to make new content formats and useful actions available—from buying movie tickets to playing podcasts—this new design allows us to add more action buttons and helpful previews to search results cards, all while giving you a better sense of the web page’s content with clear attribution back to the source,” a Google spokesperson said in a blog post.
The update is expected to be widely available in the next couple of days.
