The main problem with the feature right now is that it is too easy to accidentally launch it when you’re navigating your phone using the familiar navigation bar gestures. While that bar is pretty wide, sometimes what you’re actually trying to do is go to the home page, not initiate a search. Google knows this, and in the recent “Made by Google” podcast, Erin Lynch and Alistair Pott — who worked closely with the team that made “Circle to Search” — admitted there are improvements to be made (thanks to 9to5Google for the tip).
It works, but not without hiccups
Google says Circle to Search depends on Google Lens for the tough stuff like image searches and text recognition. Their ultimate goal is to make the feature less prone to accidental triggers so that it only launches when you really want it to. To that, Erin Lynch added:
We still have further to go, and we’re working a lot on making sure it’s triggered when you want. It’s not triggered when you don’t want.
The coolest part of this is, we’re bringing lens and search together more. So a visual question that somebody asked, there’s usually a grid of similar images that appear, but I’m really excited about our actually merging of both the search result page with the lens result page. And that’s going to be rolling out over many, many months.
Just try it out. Trigger over anything and begin your circling experience and try even copying text. It’s so silly to say. I was so questioning whether we should include, copy text in the product, but now I use it all the time.
