Google Launches Touch To Search On Android Devices, Similar To Now On Tap
Forget Now On Tap, Android users are seeing Google add Touch To Search on their devices.
Android Central reports some Android users are seeing a new feature within their mobile devices that enable the user to tap on a phrase, which then brings up a Google search response based on the word/phrase they selected.
If you download the latest version of Chrome to your Android device it may enable this feature. In addition, switching your default search engine on Android to Bing disables this feature from working.
One of the users who spotted this is named Bryant Blake who shared a picture of how to enable the feature:
Once enabled, you can then initiate the feature and it will show search results and sometimes Google Answer results based on the phrase you tapped on.
Here is a screen shot from Glenn Gabe on Twitter of how it looks like on his Galaxy 4.
At Google I/O, Google introduced Now on Tap, a way to search natively within Android, but the results lead to both quick answers and native Android apps participating in App Indexing.
We have asked Google for more details on this and will update this story when we hear back.
Below are some additional screen shots from an Android device we have here:
Related stories
New on Search Engine Land
About the author
In 2019, Barry was awarded the Outstanding Community Services Award from Search Engine Land, in 2018 he was awarded the US Search Awards the "US Search Personality Of The Year," you can learn more over here and in 2023 he was listed as a top 50 most influential PPCer by Marketing O'Clock.
Barry can be followed on X here and you can learn more about Barry Schwartz over here or on his personal site.