Chrome Makes it Easy to Search Using Text Sent from Other Devices

Shared Clipboard is part of Chrome’s efforts to provide multiple ways to share text and links between your devices. The recently discovered QR code generator is also part of this effort. To make things a bit easier, Chrome has integrated the “Send text to” feature with Omnibox. Here is how it works.

Select a sentence or two on one device and send it to your second device:

Send Text

Open the second device, in this case, my Pixel phone, and launch Chrome. Tap within the address bar or the Omnibox and you will see that shared text is ready to be pasted.

I would assume that “link you copied” will also work in the same way. Or in this case, “the link you shared”. I could not verify this on the current version of Chrome Canary.

The Flag – Omnibox clipboard text suggestions

Name: Omnibox clipboard text search suggestions

Description: Enables search suggestions in Omnibox – Android

URL: #enable-clipboard-provider-text-suggestions

An interesting thing to note here. I usually copy such flag descriptions and send it to my wife’s WhatsApp number so that I can access WhatsApp for web and then copy it from there to the blog post I am writing. Today, however, I copied the text and sent it directly to my Chromebook.

Select Default Search Engine While Setting Up Android – Coming Soon

Here is another flag that I found in the latest version of Chrome Canary on Android. I could not verify if this work, so details are scarce.

Name: Android setup search engine

Description: Enables search engine selection at Android setup. – Android

URL: #android-setup-search-engine

In the future versions of Android, you will be asked to select the default search engine while setting up the phone. This is not completely new. Google was forced to give such an option to European customers after running into some legal issues with the European Union.

Does this change bring this ability to ALL Android users? Or, is this an addon to the original feature, allowing users to select default search engine for their browser as well, during the initial set up of the phone.

What do you think?


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