Circle (or highlight or scribble) to search | Hacker News Reader

Circle (or highlight or scribble) to search

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44 pointsmeetpateltech49 comments

"Circle to Search is launching January 31 on select premium Android smartphones — the Pixel 8, Pixel 8 Pro and the new Samsung Galaxy S24 series"

Well that's a little disappointing, I was expecting at least 2 generations of Pixel devices would get it. Wonder how long it'll be before it makes its way to other handsets.

Is it just for pushing the sales of these newer models? Because you'd still have to use Google lens (though more tighter integration), but it's not intrinsic to a new hardware (gpu or cpu) at all.

I like how overly underwhelming this year apple and Samsung flagship products are. The 1 year release cadence seems to hit a point where no fundamental new changes were to be added.

It's 100% for pushing the Samsung phones, the whole galaxy unpacked event theme was "Galaxy AI."

Everyone I know has gone from upgrading every 1 or 2 years to 4+ years, including myself. Phones are much more expensive and iterations are fairly minimal, but over a 4+ year span it's pretty significant. I'm going from an S20 Ultra to S24 Ultra this year and excited for the better display, cooling, cameras, and having a stylus I can use for small pixel arty stuff without lugging my massive ipad around.

The same holds true for apple. I had an iPhone 11 that I finally broke, and the 15 is the first phone with a really significant change (lighting to usb-c). I had a 6 before the 11. OTOH, I’m a minimalist user, so maybe a lot changed between versions and it’s stuff I turn off. I spend <3h a day on my phone, it’s mostly for texting and phone calls.

Samsung at least indicated that "many" of the AI features they announced for the S24 series will also be made available on earlier flagship devices (including but possibly not limited to the S23 series, Fold5, Flip5 and Tab S9) once they get the OneUI 6.1 update. It's not currently clear exactly which features are included in that "many" though.

https://www.androidauthority.com/samsung-one-ui-6-1-galaxy-a...

Which really feels discordant with the claim that all this stuff is only enabled by the new AI-specialized hardware. I say this as someone who owns a Pixel 8 Pro - love the phone, but am utterly disillusioned with these AI claims.

Yeah, a lot of it is ultimately offloaded to the cloud and the hardware is effectively just a license key that grants you access to those API endpoints. Googles Magic Eraser was originally a cloud service, but they eventually got it working on-device with the Pixel 8 series, but they simultaneously launched Magic Editor which the Pixel 8 still defers to the cloud.

> For example, maybe you need help identifying a few items a creator wore in their “Outfit of the Day” video, but they didn’t tag the brands

Unlikely story... Pretty much every creator will be posting monetizes links to everything they show on screen...

"If your favorite content creators haven't reached the shilling-garbage stage yet, great news - you can still pretend that consumption is a meaningful way to interact with the world!"

Hm, basically just a slight modification of the gesture/process of selecting something for Lens/Image search, since the screen is basically an image of whatever. Not much to get excited about here.

Most of my searches aren't for something I'm looking at but something I think of.

Ticktok Shop sold 20B$ of items and Temi sold 10B$. All of that came from 'impulse buys' of the customers possibly because people were looking at something and wanted to buy it.

I don’t know Google, maybe you could try including the words I actually typed in the search field on your results page without me having to quote it.

Or respecting the checkboxes I set for language preferences when I’m abroad.

I’d try that first, you know? But maybe that’s just me.

I've found that quoting single words doesn't even do anything anymore. Quoting phrases still usually keeps them together, although does not always work.

Do you have an example where quoting doesn't work? I've seen this conversation many times on HN, and the conclusion is always that quoting works, but not in the way many people expect, because it searches text hidden in the DOM and source code, and ignores punctuation and HTML/DOM boundaries.

Disclosure: I work at Google but not on search.

I looked back in my history and found one from just last week:

https://www.google.com/search?q=wevideo+%22masking%22

The top hits do not include the word "masking" in then as far as I can see (although I'm in Mobile right now so can't check the DOM).

In the DOM (not the HTML returned by the initial request) of the page, I see

    <yt-smartimation class="smartimation smartimation--enable-masking">

It does seem odd to me to be searching the class names of DOM elements. I'm not sure if that's intended or a bug, or a red herring and the page is found for some other reason.

Testing more, searching for 'wevideo "smartimation"', 'wevideo "enable-masking"', 'wevideo "enable masking"', 'wevideo "enable-masking"', 'wevideo "enablemasking"', all return no results. That seems to indicate Google isn't searching class names. However, it's possible it is searching them but due to some algorithm decided to index on "masking" but not index on the other parts.

Maybe another possibility is during crawling there was a recommended video in the sidebar with "masking" in the title. I don't really know how the crawler and indexer works though, if it pays attention to those.

Maybe another possibility is I'm wrong, and for video results Google does ignore quotes.

You have to use Tools/Verbatim

This is the answer. Thank you kind user. I almost daily pop down the Tools menu to change the date. Never once had I noticed this other feature there.

It'll even suggest "must include" if it's not finding many things with one of the phrase elements and quote it for you, so you'll do that and it still won't help. I often find this with phone numbers.

I find it borderline disrespectful that it strikes and disregards a word I purposely typed in the search field.

It’s as if you ask for a coke and the bartender suggests that perhaps an orange juice would be more of your liking.

"Circle to Search can help you quickly identify items in a photo or video. Relevant ads will continue to appear in dedicated slots throughout the page."

Whew, got scared if I searched this way I wouldn't see ads.

Does this mean Google knows what we are looking at?

Apparently better than we ourselves do.

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