Google Search continues to improve and making it smarter will be the company’s proprietary Multitask Unified Model (MUM), which was spoken about earlier this year at Google’s I/O annual developer conference.

The complex technology will make search richer and easier. MUM can simultaneously understand information across a wide range of formats, including text, images, and videos, and prepare insights and connections between topics, concepts, and ideas. Google has announced one of the ways it’s planning to put MUM to work — via an update to its Google Lens visual search. Google Lens is something we are already familiar with; it uses the company’s image recognition technology that uses the phone’s camera to perform a slew of tasks, like real-time translation, identifying plants and animals, copying and pasting from photos, and much more.

“In the coming months, we’ll introduce a new way to search visually, with the ability to ask questions about what you see,” said Prabhakar Raghavan, senior vice-president, Google, at the Search On event.

Here are a couple of examples of what will be possible with MUM. You can tap on the Lens icon when you’re looking at a picture of a shirt, and ask Google to find you the same pattern. But here’s the twist… the same pattern on another article of clothing, like socks. So if you see a flower motif on a shirt, you can search for that on a pair of socks. It’s not something that’s easy to describe with words alone. “By combining images and text into a single query, we’re making it easier to search visually and express your questions in more natural ways,” said Raghavan.

Another example is when your bike has a broken thingamajig and you need help to fix it. Simply point and ask and the search will be able to find the exact moment in a video that can help.

Google Search is going to be even stronger in the coming months because of a few more developments. It will become easier to explore and understand new topics with “Things to know.” An example: Let’s say you want to decorate your apartment, and you’re interested in learning more about creating acrylic paintings. MUM will “unlock deeper insights you might not have known to search for” — like “how to make acrylic paintings with household items” while connect you with content on the web that you wouldn’t have otherwise found.

Next, you will be able to explore ideas in-depth or zoom in and out of a topic to refine searches. Third, the company is making it easier to find visual inspiration with a newly-designed, browsable results page.

It’s an important step for Google as companies like Amazon are also improving their game. For example, shopping searches are now directly starting and ending within Amazon. And rumour is that Apple is developing its own alternative to Google Search as well.