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.
"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.
"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.
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.
"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!"
> we are all humans, we should not continue to wage war against each other for any reason
That is easy to say when you have everything you need. People whose grandfather's land was stolen have no other recourse than to wage war against the occupation.
Even if they don't own it, should they not still fight for it? Is it not their right to murder the descendants of those who live on the land that their grandfathers once lived on?
Let us assume that I live in a country that your grandfather fled. Now you want to move to that country but the government will not give you citizenship. Nor did your grandfather not your father not yourself receive citizenship of the new country you are in, and you were even born in that new country (like your father before you).
What options do you have other than infiltrating my country and killing me?
Wars are never waged just to wage wars, they are a means to an end: territory expansion, access to resources, religious reasons, whatever. It’s nonsensical to say humans should wage more or less wars. I get wars are unpleasant and cause suffering. Shooting someone in self defense is unpleasant and causes suffering too. But sometimes it happens to be the right thing to do.
Well, on both of those points: (1) Net Zero is to be expected, not applauded. You mess up the planet as a side effect of becoming obscenely rich, then you put it right, sorry no star. If anything, we should be pushing for them to go well beyond Net Zero. (2) I think that's a fair question and a fair point. It might make for an interesting Hackathon though! What could Google do to alleviate the effects of war, or encourage peace? Who knows. But spending your time working out how to help people buy cool sunglasses isn't going to make much headway there.
I know this sounds dismissive and cynical, but I mean it genuinely: a Google hackathon focused on the problem of war would do as much to solve that problem as releasing a new feature to make it easier to impulse buy sunglasses.
If you want to improve the world in some way, waiting for someone else to spontaneously decide to affect the change is in generally probably not going to do it.
In general it's pretty hard to blame and guilt other entities into doing things. Hostility is met with hostility. Leading by example is the primary thing that is effective when it comes to rallying allies to a cause.
It would not be "alongside me" unless you were participating in the same aim, which you just said you were not. It really seems like a rules for thee situation.
And that's a fair point. Shame though, when you think about the sheer stack of resources and great minds that Google has, and as far as we can tell they're being squandered on things like creating then abandoning Fuscia.
I know that your comment can be read as unfairly hijacking a news item without adding much, and I'm also somewhat annoyed with it.
But I know the place it's coming from. After having been in tech for 20 years and having had the chance to write some code that runs on billions of devices now and so on, I also can't shake the growing sense that few of us work on solutions to relevant problems anymore, and the best we seem to be able to come up with - strapping screens to people's faces and forgetting the world - feels increasingly dystopic and like giving up completely. There's other stuff going on, some of it far more exciting, but my "where will this go if we build it?" critical filter is definitely a lot more primed now than it was in the early 2000s.
And I think that's probably a good thing.
On the news item though: I think an interesting new core UI gesture. If you remember those system-global text actions that were popularized in NeXTSTEP (and still stick around in systems like KDE's Plasma), this feels like a modern spin on it.
Hey thanks for embracing the idea of what I was trying to say, I think in all honesty it was a little bit of an early morning, pre-coffee snipe and it is a reasonably interesting UI gesture. Fortunately the ever-vigilant HN crowd put me in my place! ;-)
But I can tell from the rest of your comment that you understand the main gist of where I'm coming from. Of course it's not Google's fault per-se, but as a megacorp full of big brains, many of them wasted on pointless, often-abandoned busy work, it does embody this idea that we've somehow lost our way as a species. We're on this weird treadmill of capitalism and we can't get off it, and while we're addicted to influencers peddling ridiculous sunglasses there really is some horrible stuff going down. We could do so much more if there was some magical way to re-organise the planet and its governance! Euughh, time for more coffee I think...
Wow, overly dramatic and without a point. It’s a demo for a product that is supposed to make money.
What did you expect, a FLIR image of a tank then circling it to find the model? Or a dead palestinian child next to an object in Gaza, then circling the object?
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.
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.
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.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 104 ms ] threadMost of my searches aren't for something I'm looking at but something I think of.
Whew, got scared if I searched this way I wouldn't see ads.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.androidauthority.com/samsung-one-ui-6-1-galaxy-a...
Unlikely story... Pretty much every creator will be posting monetizes links to everything they show on screen...
we are all humans, we should not continue to wage war against each other for any reason.
Let us assume that I live in a country that your grandfather fled. Now you want to move to that country but the government will not give you citizenship. Nor did your grandfather not your father not yourself receive citizenship of the new country you are in, and you were even born in that new country (like your father before you).
What options do you have other than infiltrating my country and killing me?
But I know the place it's coming from. After having been in tech for 20 years and having had the chance to write some code that runs on billions of devices now and so on, I also can't shake the growing sense that few of us work on solutions to relevant problems anymore, and the best we seem to be able to come up with - strapping screens to people's faces and forgetting the world - feels increasingly dystopic and like giving up completely. There's other stuff going on, some of it far more exciting, but my "where will this go if we build it?" critical filter is definitely a lot more primed now than it was in the early 2000s.
And I think that's probably a good thing.
On the news item though: I think an interesting new core UI gesture. If you remember those system-global text actions that were popularized in NeXTSTEP (and still stick around in systems like KDE's Plasma), this feels like a modern spin on it.
But I can tell from the rest of your comment that you understand the main gist of where I'm coming from. Of course it's not Google's fault per-se, but as a megacorp full of big brains, many of them wasted on pointless, often-abandoned busy work, it does embody this idea that we've somehow lost our way as a species. We're on this weird treadmill of capitalism and we can't get off it, and while we're addicted to influencers peddling ridiculous sunglasses there really is some horrible stuff going down. We could do so much more if there was some magical way to re-organise the planet and its governance! Euughh, time for more coffee I think...
What did you expect, a FLIR image of a tank then circling it to find the model? Or a dead palestinian child next to an object in Gaza, then circling the object?
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.
Disclosure: I work at Google but not on search.
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).
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.
It’s as if you ask for a coke and the bartender suggests that perhaps an orange juice would be more of your liking.