Google Feature I’m Loving Right Now: Intelligent Search

This week Google invited me to join a field trial for new search enhancements. The enhancements span both Gmail search and regular Google search, but the feature I’ve been using the most is the Gmail search component. Now searches pull results for Labels, Contacts, Emails, Google Drive, AND Google+.*

My first thought was “Gee, that looks familiar”. At Pronto we’ve designed a similar search autocomplete feature that displays matches for inputted text categorized by content type. When you have a large result set, it’s hard to guess what their intent is. This interface helps them disambiguate themselves. We’ve been referring to it as “Intelligent Auto-Complete” and were very inspired by Spotify’s search interface. We’ll be launching our version in Q2.

But wait- there’s more! If you are logged in to Google, you will also see your Gmail & Drive results in the right-rail personal results panel (example right). In addition, they’ve added a bunch of search shortcuts so that you can see reservations, receipts, emails, and files straight from the main Google search box.

And no, it’s not some exclusive Google fangirl invite because I gush about their product features on my blog so much. Feel free to sign up for the trial yourself!

*Note: In the email they sent me, they forgot to remove a couple of instances of “Google Calendar” from the copy about where results will be pulled from. Obviously, this is part of the project, but is just not quite ready also claim that it will also search results in Google Calendar.