Ever sincethis year’s annual I/O developer conferencemade Google’s focus on AI more apparent than ever, we have been seeing AI-related features make their way into everything fromSearchtoWorkspace. However, GoogleChrome continues marching onwardswith a steady influx of new features on desktop and mobile. We just caught a glimpse of a particularly handy way to look up businesses quickly in Chrome.
Usually, looking up a business in Chrome for Android entails using the address bar or the Google Search bar on the New Tab Page (NTP). Search recommendations are accurate enough to a point where a partial query usually shows you the business or place you were looking up, like a restaurant or your nearby Walmart. Search results then serve up buttons for directions in Maps, calling the business, or visiting its website.
This can be quite a cumbersome process, so Google seems to have streamlined it inChrome Dev version 116.0.5842.3available on the Play Store. When looking up a location on one of our devices, we saw buttons to call, navigate, and read reviews for the place directly in Search recommendations, even before we had typed out the entire name of the business.
New Search experience for businesses in Chrome Dev(left); Current experience in Chrome stable(right)
Granted, these shortcuts were available only for the topmost business on the list which Google believed was the best match for our search, but the shortcuts appearing in the recommendations directly saves you precious seconds trying to find out if a restaurant is worth the drive down there, or how far away the nearest auto parts store is.
Interestingly, Google doesn’t move the buttons around to a different sequence based on the business you’re looking up. We believe it would help ifReviewswas the foremost button when looking up bakeries, for instance, but theCallbutton came first when we looked up a business that does custom orders, like a florist. Google could incorporate these down the road and there is immense scope.
For now, we would be glad to see this feature stick with Chrome 116 through to the stable channel. However, the new placement for the buttons appears to be a server-side switch even in the dev channel, perhaps like an A/B test, because we could not see it running on many other phones on the same version of the browser. It would also be nice to see similar changes to the main Google app, which handles the Search widget on Android.
