Google brings natural language search to Drive
"Show me documents created last month."
Starting today, Google Drive features Natural Language Processing to make it even easier to find that buried spreadsheet or long-lost docs. Taking a page from its Google Assistant playbook, the search box in Drive now allows for easy, human-oriented search queries like "find my budget spreadsheet from last December" or "show me presentations from Anissa."
In typical Google style, the search bar will translate the query to a more robot-like string (as in: "budget Type:Spreadsheet" in that first example) and present you with autocomplete suggestions before presenting the results. According to Google Drive Product Manager Josh Smith, the natural language processing in Drive will get smarter the more you search.
Finally, the Drive team added a couple more often-requested features to the product today, including: autocorrect for misspelled search terms, the ability to split documents into multiple columns and an auto-save feature that creates a copy whenever importing and converting non-Google formats.
The new features are live now, although they will be rolling out gradually to all users.
