The Samsung Galaxy S24 lineup launched with the much anticipated Galaxy AI and with it came a lot of fascinating features. But by far, the most amazing of them was the Circle to Search feature. Turns out, the feature was not a Samsung exclusive.
Essentially, Circle to Search lets the user search anything that is being displayed on the screen by simply drawing a circle around it. It was later revealed that the feature was being powered by Google and its cloud infrastructure. Therefore it’s no surprise that the search giant is bringing Circle to Search to their Pixel devices. Today, the feature has started rolling out but only to the Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro.
According to multiple reports on Reddit, the feature isn’t coming through a firmware update, it seems to be a server-side switch so it just ‘magically’ appears. If you have one of Google’s latest smartphones, note that you won’t get any indication that Circle to Search is live. Just try to use it and it should work if the changes have arrived on your device.
Circle to Search works anywhere on your phone. To activate it you need to long press the navigation bar and then you can just start circling and highlighting items on-screen. It’s much quicker and easier to use than Google Lens was – but it uses the same backend as Lens, which supports multimodal search queries so you can use both text and images.