One of the reasons Google’s Gmail has achieved mass adoption is because it quickly found the email you were searching for. Now, Gmail has overhauled the process to call the emails you think you’re looking for or need to search for.
Google said on Friday that Gmail will use “machine learning models” to call the most important emails inside a separate “Top Results” box. [that] It uses search terms, most recent emails, and other relevant factors to show results that best match your search terms,” Google said in a blog post. Other results appear below in the “All Results from Mail” category, sorted by newest order.
Google has referred to the new search option as a “highly requested feature,” and it’s set to roll out over a period of 15 days starting on June 2nd. This feature is available to users with personal email accounts and users with a Google Workspace subscription.
Currently, changes to search results in Gmail only apply to the mobile app. Google has not provided a timeline for when this feature will arrive in the desktop version of Gmail.
If you use Outlook, you’ll know that Microsoft’s app does a very similar job of organizing your searches into “Top Results” boxes as well as chronological search results. (The Mail app within Windows does the same thing.) The reason for doing this seems to be to call results by relevance, rather than letting the reader assume that the first result is simply sorted by most recent email exchange.
Of course, for someone who grew up with Google, this is a bit odd. One of the reasons Google and Gmail became so popular was that Microsoft’s integrated search function was so terrible that new users flocked to Gmail to find their old emails. Google seems to be saying that the previous approach hasn’t paid off.
It’s also unclear how or if this will affect your ability to use Google’s search and filter tools to identify and delete old unwanted email or clean up your Gmail inbox, which involves setting up a backup account. I’m not sure as Google seems to be in the business of selling extra storage. that It will change.