Google Chrome’s ‘Query Tiles’ to speed up searching in mobile

In an effort to create a quicker search system in any tab, Google Chrome’s team is working on ‘Query Tiles’ – a feature that will have several search shortcuts get the work done faster. 

As per androidpolice.com, the Query tiles are glorified search shortcuts with images, which let you get to sports news or look for vegetarian recipes by tapping a couple of squares instead of wasting time typing words into the Google search bar.

In the US, 13 first-level tile categories are offered: News, Films, Recipes, Fashion, Music, Health, Electronics, TV Shows, Sports, Astrology, Education, Investment, and Automobile. Tapping each one reveals a few sub-categories underneath it, like Covid-19 under news, or video games in electronics.

The tiles are currently available on Chrome Dev and Canary, but will likely trickle down to Beta and Stable in upcoming versions.

To enable the experiment, you need to head over to chrome://flags then look for “query tile.” Several flags are linked with the feature, and the first time I tried it, I had to enable nearly all of them then restart the browser twice to get them to work. Everything seemed very finicky too, but after a couple of days and some browser updates, it appears to be more stable and fluid, and no longer requires all flags to be enabled.

Once you make a selection, Chrome automatically starts a search based on the tile keywords you choose and the results are displayed in the same tab. Alternatively, you also get the option to edit the search before it’s submitted to get more customized results. You can alternate between these two behaviors by enabling/disabling the #query-tiles-enable-query-editing flag.