The Circle to Search feature that Google announced back in January has started to roll out to the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro. If you have either one of these devices, then you should be able to use it as a means for searching for more information about content on-screen.
You can use it virtually anywhere. No matter what you’re browsing or what you’re doing on the phone. Once you circle something, Google will populate a box on-screen that surrounds the item or words you circled. The results of the search then pop up in a panel from the bottom of the screen.
Circle to Search on Pixel 8 makes for easy and intuitive searching for everything
Google’s Circle to Search feature is intended to give users a quicker, more intuitive way to gather information about stuff. And it can be a super fast method for finding additional information about products. Say you’re at the grocery store and you see an item you want to know more about. You can simply take a photo of the item, then open that photo and circle it to search for information. Super easy and relatively fast. To use the feature you do have to activate it but that doesn’t take much effort.
You can activate it in two ways. Either long press on the nav handle at the bottom if you’re using gesture navigation, or long press on the home button if you’re using the three-button navigation. This brings up the circle to search overlay where you can circle or tap the area you want to search. You can also draw a line over the area you’re searching and that works too.
Additionally, it’s possible to add text to the search and potentially more precise results. If you circle to search for something and you don’t get the results you were looking for, you can easily resize the box that pops up and drag it around to see if the results change too. You can use this feature to highlight text as well. To do this, activate circle to search and then tap on or draw a line over any text you want to highlight. Google also makes it possible to scroll around the page to look at something else by using two fingers to scroll around.
This feature began rolling out to Pixel 8 devices on January 31. So there’s a good chance you have access to it already. Google does like to roll things out in waves though so don’t be too surprised if it isn’t active on your device yet.