Search. It’s what Google’s main business is, especially when paired with advertising, so it’s no wonder that they’re adding new ways to search all the time. The latest addition is now rolling out to Chrome users, but as no recent update has gone out, it appears it’s a server side switch.
The feature simply pops up when you highlight a word in Chrome – in this case, I accidentally highlighted ‘Customer’ in an Ausdroid article and was presented with a result from Wikipedia, where Google draws a lot of their knowledge graph from. There are of course instances where Wikipedia isn’t the best source of information, so other results show instant Google search results which you can select :
The setting to switch Touch to search can be accessed in Chrome under Settings > Privacy > Touch to Search – but even with it switched on, it seems to only be working once Google flicks that switch.
It’s a neat feature and should be available soon if you haven’t got it as yet – make sure that setting is on and try it out.
Doesn’t show for me (Chrome 43 on Ubuntu) but I’ve always had the ability to highlight a word / phrase, right-click and choose “search google for …..”. This looks a bit cooler and a click or two less though.
been using this with chrome flags for a while…..its also smart that if you select a word it will search with the relevant word…ie…if you select only “ben” and not select affleck which is next to it…google will actually show u results for “ben affleck”…now that’s smart 🙂
Just noticed this and was just sending an email to you…..beat me to it