Google is adding three features – Google Lens, Tab Compare and AI History – to its Chrome browser. All three are reliant on Google AI or Google Gemini.
Any browser will keep track of the sites you visit and list them for you in a “history.” But Chrome will now enable you to enter queries in everyday language so that you can “retrace your steps” to a site you’ve visited.
Google says this AI version of the history function can be turned on or off in the settings and will “never include any browsing data from incognito mode.” What this likely means, however, is that the data still exists but will not be included in what you, the user, are shown.
This past April, Google settled the case of Brown v Google LLC in US District Court of Northern California, agreeing to:
- disclose “on the Incognito Splash Screen that automatically appears at the beginning of every Incognito session” that it “collects private browsing data”
- “delete and/or remediate billions [emphasis in the filing] of data records that reflect class members’ private browsing activities” – “private browsing sessions” included
- maintain “for the next five years” a change “that enables Incognito users to block third-party cookies by default”
The second feature, Tab Compare, “presents an AI-generated overview of products from across multiple tabs, all in one place,” as Chrome Vice President Parisa Tabriz writes in the annunciatory blog post. It brings “all the essential details – product specs, features, price, ratings – into one tab,” for comparison, thereby saving you from “endless tab switching.”
Finally, Google Lens has been operative on smartphones for a while. The innovation here is its addition to the desktop browser. You drag the icon or call the feature forth with a right-click or from the three-dot menu.
Lens will perform an internet search on anything you point at in your browser window, even if it’s something you see in a video. It will display “matches and results” related to your chosen detail in a side panel. “You can then use multisearch to refine your search by color, brand or another detail, or you can ask follow up questions to dive deeper into a topic,” Tabriz writes. “Depending on your question, you might get an AI Overview response that brings together the most relevant information from across the web.” Lens will also tell you “where to purchase.”
But what does “most relevant” mean for Tab Compare or Lens? Once again, what are you being shown and not shown?
As we reported in August, the US District Court of the District of Columbia has ruled, among other things, that Google has monopoly power in “general search services and general search text ads” and that its “distribution agreements are exclusive and have anticompetitive effects.”
To put things the age-old way: Cui bono? Which vendors get to enjoy the business that the Lens or Tab Compare side panel generates, and why? As we have reported elsewhere, Google has, in the past, admitted to ranking results to serve its own ends rather than using simple criteria like search popularity. Moreover, if Lens and Tab Compare work on Google AI or Gemini, they must differ in algorithm from plain-old Google search. What effect does this have on search engine optimization (SEO)?
