Google Drive Search Gets Natural Language Processing, Suggestions

Google on Tuesday tweaked its Drive to make searching a lot easier. Google's cloud storage and file backup service is now smarter when it comes to searching for your documents.

The update brings a few new functionality familiar to Google Search users. Firstly, Google Drive now supports Natural Language Processing (NLP). This essentially means users can search for files in Google Docs with natural, conversational language syntax, and Drive will find it for you.

When you type a simple query like "find my budgetsheet from last December," Google Drive "will understand what you mean and give you the option to click for those specific search results," according to Google's blog post. However, Drive will first rephrase your query to a more specific one before it starts searching.

The second feature is the 'Did you mean' search suggestions that Search users often get when there are typos in their queries. Drive's new autocorrect suggests corrections to misspelled search terms.

Other features for Google Docs found with the new update are:

• You can now easily split your document into multiple columns in Docs. Just choose "Columns" in the "Format" drop-down menu when you need more formatting options to get your point across.
• We know that work happens in all types of file formats. So, when you open, convert and edit non-Google files in Docs, Sheets and Slides, we'll now save a copy for you. Just view or download the non-Google source file in its original format directly from Revision History in Docs, Sheets and Slides on the web.

These new highly-requested features were added by Google based on user feedback. Google says the features are available worldwide and will be rolling out gradually starting Tuesday.

Google has been keeping itself quite busy in the past few weeks, introducing new features to its core sites and apps like Google Trips and Google Allo. Google is also ready to unveil its rebranded smartphone lineup with the Pixel on October 4.