How to get Circle to Search on a Windows PC

What Circle to Search does, and why your PC does not have it

On a supported Android phone, you hold the home button or navigation bar, circle or scribble over anything on screen, and Google searches for it — text, an object, a product in a photo — without leaving the app you are in. It is a feature of Android itself, built by Google with phone makers, which is why no Windows or Mac version exists.

What people actually want from it on a PC is the gesture: select any part of the screen, in any app, and get an answer about it. That part has four good substitutes.

Inside Chrome: Google Lens

In desktop Chrome, Lens works much like the real feature, as long as what you want is on a web page.

1. Right-click anywhere on the page and choose Search with Google Lens.
2. Drag over the part of the page you are curious about — an image, a block of text, a product.
3. Results open in a side panel next to the page: matches, text you can copy or translate, and often an AI summary.

Lens in Chrome only sees the browser tab. It cannot select a PDF open in another app, a desktop program, a video call or a game, and everything you select is sent to Google.

Google's app for Windows: Lens on the whole screen

In April 2026 Google made its Google app for Windows available to everyone, in English. Press Alt+Space to open its search bar — it searches the web, your files, your installed apps and Google Drive — and use its built-in Lens to select anything on your screen: a window or the whole desktop, not just a browser tab. It is the nearest thing to Circle to Search that Google makes for a PC.

It works in English only, and what you select is sent to Google, as with Lens everywhere.

On a Copilot+ PC: Click to Do

Microsoft's own answer is Click to Do: hold the Windows key and click anything on screen, or press Win+Q, to get actions for it — copy or summarise text, search the web, remove an image's background and more, depending on what you selected and on your language and region (summarising, for one, needs English as the Windows language). It analyses the screen on the PC itself and is the most native option on Windows, but it needs a Copilot+ PC, the class of PCs with a built-in neural processor that meets Microsoft's requirements, so most existing Windows PCs cannot run it.

In every app, on any PC: ScreenFeel

ScreenFeel puts the gesture on the Print Screen key of any Windows 10 or 11 PC. Press it, drag around anything in any application, and choose what you want from the lens grid: Auto works out what you captured and tells you what matters about it; Explain says what you are looking at; Read text copies the words; Translate puts them into your language.

1. Install ScreenFeel from the Microsoft Store and let it take the Print Screen key.
2. Press Print Screen and drag over the thing you want to know about — in a PDF reader, a spreadsheet, a video call, a game, anything.
3. Choose Auto, or the lens that matches your question. Follow-up questions go in the box underneath.

Unlike Circle to Search, nothing is sent to a search engine. The capture stays on your PC, and a lens sends that one image, once, to a model that keeps nothing. It answers with an explanation rather than a page of search results — useful when the question is what something means rather than where to buy it.

Which one should you use?

• Shopping or identifying something on a web page: Google Lens in Chrome. Visual matches are what it is best at.
• Anything on screen, in English, and you are happy to send it to Google: the Google app for Windows.
• You have a Copilot+ PC and want quick actions on anything: Click to Do, which is already built in.
• Anything outside the browser, on any PC, or anything you would rather not send to a search engine: ScreenFeel.

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