A new feature in Chrome has just been spotted that allows you to tap words on a page and easily see definitions and other knowledge graph details via a convenient pull-out tab. The feature doesn’t seem to have widely rolled out yet and supplements Chrome’s existing “touch to search” functionality, which allows you to select words to perform a simple search in a pull-out tab.
The new feature works for both dictionary definitions, names, foods, chemical elements, and probably many more categories of items, showing a small icon of either a related image or a book (in the case of word definitions) together with a short description which describes the thing. In the case of dictionary results, it also includes a pronunciation guide. If you tap a phrase or name that has multiple words to it, Chrome seems able to figure out the full term pretty easily.
Also note that if you long-press rather than tap, you get the existing touch to search feature instead.
A gallery of different results.
Like the existing (but slightly different) touch to search functionality, pulling up on the bar gives you a tab from Google’s search results, taking you directly to the relevant details in Google’s knowledge graph. Unlike touch to search, though, this page seems to be pre-loaded before you even pull it up. Touch to search lacks both the extra icon/definition in it’s collapsed state, and further requires that the search separately load when triggered.
Tapping a word brings up the information (after a short delay). Pulling up that bar takes you to the knowledge graph results.
We can’t tell how widely this new feature has rolled out yet. Again, it’s very similar to the long-standing touch to search feature, but different in that it displays results from the knowledge graph in a collapsed state. Several of us at Android Police have it on the latest stable version of Chrome (v83.0.4103.106), but our tipster reports seeing it on an un-updated instance of the Brave browser. The rollout may be tied to a Google app version (we see it on more than one version here at AP), but it also seems to be tied to a “Contextual Search definitions” flag in Chrome on Android. Disabling the flag also disables the feature.
The flag may have been around for a while and tied to the long-standing touch to search functionality, we can’t be sure. But this recent and subtle change in behavior appears new in our testing. In the meantime, you can check to see if you have it with a single literal tap.
