On my mobile phone, I recently highlighted some text in an article and a header with Google’s logo and the selected text popped up from the bottom of the screen.
It started with a click on social media that led me to an article on WFTV’s mobile site. Intrigued, I was interested in the details of the story so I highlighted some text to do more research:
After selecting my text, a pop-up came up from the bottom with a header featuring the highlighted text and Google’s logo:
I had never experienced this behavior on Android before. I clicked on the header and the other browser popped up with a Google search results for the selected text. In this case the top three search results for “Michael Blasewitz,”
Awesome.
Clearly, Google looked at a lot of user data and saw that when text was selected, the next step was to plug that text into search. Google’s goal has always been to get users the information they’re searching for quicker and this is just another search feature which accomplishes this.
Instead of taking the steps to select the text, copying it, opening a browser, pasting the text and searching, this removes three of those five steps to get a user the information faster.
I tested this several times and it doesn’t work across Android apps, but only activates when selecting text within Android’s Chrome browser. Not sure if this is a permanent feature or just a test, but I approve.
