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Google's Inbox app now delivers way smarter search results

Google's Inbox app now delivers way smarter search results

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Google is making it much easier to find orders, reservations, flights, and other information hidden inside your email. Now when you perform a search inside Inbox — its alternate app for Gmail — the app will try to present you with exactly what you're looking for, rather than just giving you a list of relevant emails. If you search for an upcoming flight, for instance, Inbox should present you with a card that lists your flight information; Google says Inbox can also find addresses, phone numbers, membership numbers, events, bills, and package tracking details all through the new search feature.

Great for people with too many emails

For the most part, this new feature just helps to surface something that Inbox is already doing: pulling out the most important parts of your email. The app has always presented cards for flights and package tracking inside your inbox, but those can still be hard to find if you have hundreds of other emails around them. Being able to get the card you want just by searching for it should be a huge help when you need to pull something up quickly — several times in the past few weeks I've been digging through Inbox to find flight confirmations, check-ins, and car rental info while approaching a customer service counter, and this feature certainly would have sped things up.

Some of the things that Inbox can surface through search appear to be new to the app, too. Membership numbers don't make sense to highlight in your inbox, but being able to pull them out when requested makes sense; same goes for addresses and phone numbers. Of course, Inbox will still display search results, too, they'll just appear below the highlighted card. The update appears to be rolling out gradually, with Google's blog post saying the feature will start to go live today.


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