What is Google Lens?

Google Lens is a set of vision-based computing capabilities that can understand what you’re looking at and use that information to copy or translate text, identify plants and animals, explore locales or menus, discover products, find visually similar images and take other useful actions.

Search what you see

Google Lens lets you search what you see. Using a photo, your camera or almost any image, Lens helps you to discover visually similar images and related content, gathering results from all over the Internet.

How Google Lens works

Lens compares objects in your picture to other images, and ranks those images based on their similarity and relevance to the objects in the original picture. Lens also uses its understanding of the objects in your picture to find other relevant results from the web. Lens may also use other helpful signals, such as words, language and other metadata on the image’s host site, to determine ranking and relevance.

When analysing an image, Lens often generates several possible results and ranks the probable relevance of each result. Lens may sometimes narrow these possibilities to a single result. Let’s say that Lens is looking at a dog that it identifies as probably 95% German Shepherd and 5% Corgi. In this case, Lens might only show the result for a German shepherd, which Lens has judged to be most visually similar.

In other cases, when Lens is confident that it understands which object you’re interested in within the picture, Lens will return Search results related to the object. For example, if an image contains a specific product – such as jeans or sneakers – Lens may return results that provide more information about that product, or shopping results for the product. Lens may also rely on available signals, such as the product’s user ratings, to return such results. In another example, if Lens recognises a barcode or text in an image (for example, a product name or a book title), Lens may return a Google Search results page for the object.

Relevant and useful results

Lens always tries to return the most relevant and useful results. Lens’ algorithms aren’t affected by advertisements or other commercial arrangements. When Lens returns results from other Google products, including Google Search or Shopping, the results rely on the ranking algorithms of those products.

To ensure Lens results are relevant, helpful and safe, Lens identifies and filters explicit results. These results are identified using Google-wide standards such as Google SafeSearch guidelines.

Lens and location

When you agree to let Lens use your location, it uses that information to return more accurate results – for example, when identifying places and landmarks. So if you’re in Paris, Lens will know that it’s more likely that you’re looking at the Eiffel Tower, rather than a similar-looking structure somewhere else in the world.