It’s nice to hear that tick-tick-ticking once more
As quietly as it seemingly went away, Google Search’s timer seems to have come back without much of a whisper. Okay, someone did say something about it this week.
You may recall from the end of last month that commands to the desktop or mobile web versions of Google Search for “set timer for X minutes,” “start stopwatch,” and others had stopped working all of a sudden — users who would normally see a widget with said timer (which automatically started) or stopwatch only saw irrelevant search results (well, at least irrelevant to what they really wanted out of Google Search).
Google Search liaison Danny Sullivan was made very well aware of the problem, but wasn’t able to provide a satisfying answer as to when or even if the feature would be brought back. Sullivan confirmed on August 1 that the feature would eventually return, but didn’t have a timeline.
On Wednesday, Sullivan tweeted (via The Verge) some welcome news:
Indeed, if you ask Google to “set a timer,” you’ll now see one start counting down from 5 minutes. You can also put down other amounts of time or set it for a time of day like 3:15 p.m. And yes, you can also pull up a stopwatch, too, but you’ll need to start that one on your own.
Of course, you could do the exact same things by issuing a voice command to the Google app or Google Assistant on your mobile device, but for people who are just stuck on their desktops and want a way to track the time, this feature has always been a great standby. And hey, it sure beats counting with your fingers.
