One of the drawbacks of the Google Drive cloud storage platform always was the fact that searching for files was a bit lackluster. Google is looking to change that and the first step was announcing that users will have the possibility of using the searching capabilities of the Google app. Through the Google app, users will be able to search for files located on their Drive directly. This has been made possible thanks to the latest update pushed through by Google, targeting multiple services including Google Drive.
Indexing through Firebase seems to be the answer to this equation, as that is how Google is able to provide this extra feature. It helps take applications such as Google Drive and index them into Google Search. Keep in mind that these apps have to be installed on the device.
To seamlessly find files within your Google Drive storage, you can now bring up the Google app and search for the respective file. Once that’s done, tap on the In App option at the top to bring up search results that are found locally. This also includes files within Google Drive, as it is an application installed on your local storage.
Many are questioning the effectiveness of this feature because you might just as easily open Drive and search for the file. But what many don’t take into consideration is that we could be talking about a file that the user forgot where he left. That means that they would have to go through all the possible locations. By streamlining search results, Google is allowing users to search for a file anywhere on the device and get it as quickly as possible, with no second guesses involved. When you look at it like that, adding Google Drive to the list of services and apps that are part of Google app search pool is actually pretty great.
As is the case a lot of times with software updates, it’s about the small, cumulative tweaks that combined result into a lot of utility. The latest update to Google Drive might be rather minimal, but it makes a lot of difference in certain cases.
Leave a Reply