Some YouTube users who watch from an Android device will start seeing a new option in the app’s search bar: Google Lens. Google said it’s experimenting with adding its Lens search-by-camera feature to YouTube on Android mobile devices. Google said its test is rolling out to a “small percentage” of viewers.
The way it works is similar to Google Lens in any app. If Google has added the feature to your account, the YouTube search bar on Android will include a Google Lens icon next to the text box and the microphone icon. Tapping the Google Lens icon will pull up the phone’s camera, and Lens can then search for an item in the camera’s field of view, or text it detects as well.
The results page shows a list of suggested YouTube searches based on what Lens has seen, and a button below that list offers to perform the search on Google.
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The test, which was earlier reported by 9to5Google, is another example of how the search giant is trying to find ways to make its YouTube video service more useful. YouTube is already the second most popular site on the internet, behind Google’s namesake search engine. It’s also particularly popular among young people, with the Pew Research Center reporting earlier this year that 93% of all US teens have used YouTube, far more than the 63% who said they’d used TikTok, the 60% who’d used Snapchat and the 59% who reported using Instagram.
YouTube’s success has come in part because of the variety of videos people upload. There are entertainers, of course, but YouTube has also become known for people who upload tutorials and guides for everything from playing video games to practicing magic tricks to fixing car engines. As a result, users on average spend more than 20 minutes on the site, according to Similarweb, more than twice as long as they spend on competing platforms.
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Google’s test with Lens adds to other ways the search giant has been expanding ways to help people find content on YouTube. Earlier this year, the company added the ability to search the YouTube Music app by humming into the microphone. The company has also been expanding access to its popular Circle to Search feature, which allows you to draw on any part of your screen, including something in a YouTube video, to perform a visual Google search.
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Google is also experimenting with future versions of its search. In May, it unveiled Project Astra, a demo that combined Google Lens-like features with an AI assistant that could read code, identify plants and even remember where you’d left your glasses. Recent AI gadgets, including the Rabbit R1, the Humane AI Pin and Meta’s Ray-Bans, are still struggling to fulfill that type of promise.
