Google seems to be working on Circle to search for videos

Keeping track of the different ways Google searches for things is practically a full-time job. We have web browsers, widgets on our phones, Assistant, Gemini, and probably half a dozen other ways to access the company's services at any time – and that list keeps growing. Today we're looking at how we might start unifying some of these different routes to make searching for videos easier.

Currently, Google offers you a few options to start your search with a video. AI Overview allows you to use a video recording to start a search in Lens. And if you watch videos on YouTube, you can go to Gemini and use the “Ask about this video” tool. However, Google may be working on a more general method that will allow you to search virtually any video.

While reviewing the changes in version 15.39.39.29.arm64 of the Google Android app, we noticed a few hints of a new method for browsing videos:

If you've been paying close attention, you might recognize “omnient” as Google's code name for Circle to Search. In addition to this text string, we also discover a new icon in the app that refers to omnium and video playback.

We haven't been able to get the app to enable this mode yet – that may have to wait for a future release – but based solely on what we can see here, it seems like this could be a tool for the search for beauty virtually any video you come across on your phone, whether it's a clip you shot yourself, an embedded video on a website, or even something you watch on YouTube.

Certainly such an adaptable video search tool would be very attractive, but we should perhaps curb our enthusiasm until we see exactly how this could be implemented. Can we search for clips that we find in apps like TikTok or Instagram? That would be great, but we can also expect some hurdles that could make implementing such a feature a bit difficult. For now, let's keep trying to crack this nut and see if we can't get Circle to Search for Video to work.