Joe Mark / Android Authority
One of my favorite things about Google’s Pixel phones is the Google Search Bar at the bottom of the home screen. This is such a simple feature, but to have permanent access to Google, and through my thumb, this is a great convenience.
Earlier this month, we have reported that Google is getting ready to change this search bar by adding another shortcut to it – this time, a Google AI format. It seems that this shortcut is now widely roaming the pixel phones to run Android 16, as my Pixel 9A has just received it the next day.
And I had to be honest: I hate it.
Google Search Bar on Pixel phones is a mess
Joe Mark / Android Authority
With this latest addition, the search bar now serves four important functions: performing Google’s regular search, using AI mode, starting a sound search, and launching Google Lens.
To be so functioning in a single area, reasonably, is a good use of space. However, as a person who does not use Anyone Of these extra shortcuts, they are not helpful at all. I am sure that if you regularly use AI format, sound searching and lenses, they are very good, but if you don’t, they just look at the pixel home screen disorder and dirty.
Moreover, the more shortcuts add to Google, the less the free space to tap the search bar for the thing I use for: Google Search launch. It’s not as impossible to indicate Google’s regular search, but AI mode is very close to the middle of the icon bar (at least on Pixel 9A) that I have mistakenly tapped AI mode instead of regular search area while tapping my thumb quickly.
In Pixel 6 times, the search bar had just the sound search icon on the right – and I was fine with it! To start typing the search, I could still tap anywhere, and for these rare events, when I want to say loudly, the voice mode was good at the shortcut.
When Google added the Google Lens icon at the time of Pixel 7, I was slightly angry, though I was convinced that where additional icons would end. Still, we are here, a few years later, the AI mode icon proved to me wrong.
Do you like the new AI mode shortcut on the Google Search Bar?
65 votes
Please, Google, let’s change it
Joe Mark / Android Authority
Now, is this the end of the world? The biggest problem is Google’s Pixel phones? Not at all. Nevertheless, I think it is appropriate to argue that this latest change in the pixel search bar is not good.
I am offering more ways to users to use the search bar with Google, but we should have some input to see what extra shortcut we want. Hell, Google offers exactly what it allows you to change the shortcut at its end with its regular search widgets – whether it is AI format, Google Translate, Google Weather, or none. Nevertheless, for any reason, the search bar on the pixel phone lacks this custom.
Small such cases are more disturbing because they are discretionary.
Google’s Pixel phones are considered to offer the best Google on Android phones. Although there is so much so that Google gets fine, such problems are more disturbing because they are discretionary. I should be able to overcome my pixel look like a Google search bar. Tools are regular for Android widgets, so why can’t I use them on my pixel?
If you have a pixel running Android 16 and you like AI mode, I’m happy for you. But for the rest of us, I just hope that Google allows us to get rid of this new shortcut soon rather than later.
