Google Chrome is adding region search aka Google Lens to the PDF viewer. You will soon be able to right-click and choose ‘Search Images with Google Lens’ on PDF files.

Google Lens is one of my favorite features on Chrome. I use it quite often to fact-check social media content among other things. I never thought that Google will bring this to PDF files as well.

Google is working on Google Lens support for its PDF viewer. An experimental flag for this feature showed up in the Chromium Gerrit this morning.

Enable Region Search on PDF viewer: Enable the Lens Region Search feature on the PDF viewer.

But, there is a catch

According to the Chromium bug for this feature, image search is not supported yet.

“Note that we are enabling *Region Search* only, which is the feature where you click and drag to select a region of the page to search. *Image Search* (where you right-click on an image to search) is not covered by this bug and may not ever make sense to enable on PDFs (see discussion on the bug linked above).”

PDF files tend to be text-heavy most of the time. So, this may not be a deal breaker. However, it is good to know the limitations of this feature before getting excited about it.

I am 100% sure that I will use this feature regularly when it is out. I would love to hear your thoughts on this new Chrome feature. Let me know in the comments section below.

Source: Chromium Gerrit and bugs.chromium.org.