Google will let you search your Chrome browsing history by asking questions as a person

You are neck deep in a research project but the finish line is in sight. You click the close button on your browser. It disappears and takes over a bunch of tabs you had open. You breathe – and remember that you just need to confirm one more information on one of the web pages you have opened. The problem is you don’t know who it was or how to get back there. You start digging through your browser history, clicking hard on any pages that look familiar, but are familiar pages. he knew you looked as if you had disappeared.

If this sounds familiar, a new feature coming to Google Chrome on the desktop in the next few weeks may be just what you need. With it, you’ll be able to query your browsing history in natural language using Gemini, Google’s family of large language models that power its AI systems. You can type a question like “What was that ice cream shop I looked at last week?” in your address bar after accessing your history and Chrome will display related pages from whatever you’ve browsed so far.

“The top tier really wants to introduce a conversational interface to Chrome’s history so that people don’t have to remember URLs,” said Parisa Tabriz, Chrome’s vice president, in an interview with reporters before the announcement.

The feature will only be available to Chrome desktop users in the US for now and will be automatic. It also won’t work with websites you browse in Incognito mode. And the company says it knows the implications of having Google’s AI pass on your browsing history to give you feedback. Tabriz said the company doesn’t directly use your browsing history or tabs to train its big brands of languages. “Anything related to browsing history is very personal, sensitive data,” he said. “We want to think carefully and make sure we think about privacy from the beginning and through the structure.”

In addition to making going through your search history more conversational, Google is adding two new AI-powered features to Chrome. It finally brings Google Lens, which is already on Android and iPhones, to Chrome on the desktop in the US. “This means you’ll be able to easily select, search and ask questions about anything you see on the web, all without leaving your current tab,” according to Google’s blog about the feature.

You can search with Google Lens in Chrome on the desktop by selecting its icon in the address bar and clicking on anything on the web page you want to search. Clicking on an image of a plant on a web page with Google Lens, for example, will open a sidebar directly on the web page and point to it. You can then ask follow-up questions such as “how much sunlight does this plant need to stay alive?” and get AI-generated answers in-line without leaving the page you’re on.

The lens is also able to analyze the text inside the videos, which means that you can hit a moment and directly select any text displayed in the frame (such as a mathematical equation) and quickly get an explanation in the sidebar with additional information generated by AI about it.

Finally, Google is adding Tab Compare, a feature that will present a complete AI-generated view of products across multiple tabs in one place “By bringing all the important information – product details, features, price, ratings – to one tab, you will be able to easily compare and make a decision information without endless tab switching,” said Google.

For now, this feature is limited to products, but Tabriz envisions a future where it could appear to let you compare multiple schools, universities, kindergartens, or anything that would “make it easier for people to make comparative decisions.”