Circle to Search could be picking up a powerful new tool for videos (APK teardown)

Joe Hindy / Android Authority

Keeping track of all the different ways Google gives us to search for things is practically a full-time job. We’ve got web browsers, widgets on our phones, Assistant, Gemini, and probably half a dozen other ways to tap into the company’s services at any given moment — and that list’s only getting bigger. Today we’re checking out what could be a way to start unifying some of these disparate routes, all in the name of making it easier to search videos.

An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.

Right now, Google gives you a few ways to start your search with a video. With AI Overview, you can use a video recording to initiate a search through Lens. And when you’re watching videos on YouTube, you can pull up Gemini and use its “ask about this video” tool. But Google might be working on a more general-purpose way to let you search basically any video.

While looking through the changes in version 15.39.39.29.arm64 of the Google Android app, we’ve spotted some references to a new method for searching videos:

If you’ve been paying careful attention, you might recognize “omnient” there as Google’s codename for Circle to Search. In addition to that text string, we also spot a new icon in the app that makes reference to omnient and video playback.

We haven’t yet been able to trigger the app to activate this mode just yet — that may need to wait for a future release — but even just based on what we can see here, it feels like this could be a tool for searching pretty much any video you come across on your phone, whether it’s a clip you shot yourself, an embedded video on some website, or even something you’re watching on YouTube.

Certainly, there would be a lot of appeal in a video search tool that’s so adaptable, but we may want to constrain our enthusiasm until we see exactly how this might be implemented. Will we be able to search clips we come across in apps like TikTok or Instagram? That would be great, but we can also anticipate a few hurdles that might make implementing a feature like that a little tricky. For now, well keep trying to crack this nut and see if we can’t get Circle to Search for video working.

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