There’s a new trend and it’s not going to go away: Circle to Search on the smartphone. The feature is taking wings with Samsung’s new Galaxy S24 series and perhaps the success of the feature has a lot to do with its simplicity.

A photo of a person wearing a cool pair of sneakers appears on your Galaxy S24 screen. Instead of running a text search to find out more about the image, just draw a circle around the object to get matches from the web.

At the moment, the feature is restricted to a few phones, namely Samsung Galaxy S24, the Galaxy S24 Plus, and the Galaxy S24 Ultra. As of the end of January, it also came to the Google Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro.

Here’s how to use the feature. Those who are using Android with navigation buttons, long-press on the home button (the circle) to launch Circle to Search. In case you are using gestures to navigate, long-press on the navigation handle at the bottom of the screen to access the feature.

Well, you don’t actually have to circle something to get the search working. Simply drag a line across it, you can scribble on top of it or use the S Pen on it. Next, you’ll notice handles around the selected object, and you can tap and drag these around if you want to expand or shrink the search selection.

The results are like those on Google Lens but this is a far quicker approach. The pop-up results have a search bar at the top: tap here to type out an additional query (or use the mic to offer additional instruction).

The feature is not perfect yet but there is immense potential for it. And it works on top of other apps: an Instagram caption, for example, or a webpage image or artwork on a podcast.