Google Lens continues to be a promising feature in the world of local commerce. As a visual search tool, it can identify and contextualize items that you point your phone at. Carrying similar user intent as web search, Google is salivating over the idea of more high-intent query volume that flows from your camera.
With that ongoing motivation, Google this week launched some new features in Google Lens that promote physical world shopping. Some of these were features already baked into Lens, but Google is now formalizing them and pushing them front and center to continue to whet consumers’ appetites.
Specifically, Google Lens now offers reviews price comparisons, and local availability when users scan a given product. The idea is that they can be more informed shoppers through pricing and product transparency while shopping in the physical world. Google, as always, wants to be a part of that flow.
Importantly ,these results can include the exact item being scanned, as well as visually-similar products. The latter is useful for finding new things or “fashion discovery.” Altogether, visual search (along with voice search) represent supplementary search inputs that Google continues to develop in the AI era.
Showrooming 2.0
Speakig of AI, the data come from a combination of Google Images, Gemini, and Google Shopping (product availability), including the Shopping Graph’s 45 billion product listings. It will specialize in beauty, toys, and electronics, including results from Target, Ulta Beauty, Macy’s, Norstrom, and others.
Altogether, this makes Google Lens the latest version of the “showrooming” trend that started more than a decade ago. Traditionally, consumers have used barcode scanning apps like Red Laser to get in-aisle product information so that they could do competitive online shopping or read product reviews.
The difference now is that there’s no need to use barcodes: Google recognizes products based on their appearance, using machine learning – much of which flows from Google Images and Gemini, as noted. This is useful if you can’t get up close, such as a garment you see on the street that someone is wearing.
As for rollout and availability, the new shopping features in Google Lens will be available starting this week in the Google and Chrome apps for Android and iOS users. For now, it’s only available in the U.S. and users have to turn on location sharing in order to use it. This all comes just in time for the holidays.
Where Do I Buy This?
This week’s Google Lens updates come shortly after a similar visual search advancement. Google announced earlier this month that Chrome browser users on iOS can search with a combination of text and images. This was already available in Google Lens but now comes to the browser.
This combination of inputs is known as multimodal search. The idea is that visual searches are often more natural than text. Multimodal search lets you combine them for even greater dimension in a search query. For example, you can use an image of a jacket and say “Where do I buy this?”
Like all of the above, this has several potential directions that carry high commercial intent, which is the part Google is keen to develop. In fact, Google Lens now sees 20 billion monthly searches (considerable but still marginal, relative to overall query volume), 20 percent of which are commercial in nature.
Combined with similar visual search moves underway, at Apple and Meta (Ray-Ban Meta Smartglasses rely heavily on multimodal AI), Google’s latest could accelerate demand and adoption for visual search. , Meanwhile, these moves also signal the level of visual search investment and interest from tech giants.
