And using that info to come up with more relevant results
If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably had your Gmail account active for years. I signed up for a Google account and, therefore, for Gmail all the way back in 2008 — that is a lot of emails over the span of almost a decade and a half. But even for email addresses that have only existed for a much shorter period, the mass of accumulated emails can get pretty untidy, pretty fast, and especially so if you’re using it as your main email. While you can take steps to clean out your inbox, Google wants to make it easier to sift through those important keepers by making a better search tool for Gmail.
In July, Google announced a series of changes to Gmail’s search functions on the web client. These changes brought in contacts and other personalized suggestions into the results based on your past exchanges with other users. Now, in a late update, the company says your searches will also take into account your previous search activity, meaning results will also be optimized based on what you were looking for before. Google hopes these changes make users’ findings through Gmail search “more relevant and contextual.” We’ve had search history in our search bars for a long time, but this change seems to be about analyzing your past queries and using that to optimize the actual results. If you’re using Gmail in offline mode, do note that search won’t work.
This seems to be more of a backend change than something you’ll immediately notice when hitting up mail.google.com to dig through your various, unkempt folders for an old message, but it should mean that whenever you do search for one, you’ll get what you’re looking for much faster. Google has previously said that Gmail’s search suggestions and search results are being constantly improved thanks to the magic of machine learning, so this seems to be a practical extension of that. The company detailed in its Google Workspace Updates blog post that these changes should be arriving to everyone within the next two weeks, so if you find yourself stressing less after picking up an old email, you probably have this development to be grateful for. After all, it is the season to give thanks.
