Google has made a significant change in the background on Google Drive, bringing natural language processing to the search feature of the web-based part of the service. Essentially what you can now do is search for things using natural language instead of specific file names. This is the same technology that is used in Google Search to help you find things in a more natural language style.
Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a fancy way of saying “search like you talk.” You can type things like “find my budget spreadsheet from last December” or “show me presentations from Anissa.” Drive will understand what you mean and give you the option to click for those specific search results. Drive NLP will get better with each query — so keep on searching. 😉
This new feature is likely to be a big time saver for those who have a lot of files in Drive.
In addition to the new NLP features, Google has also improved the spell checking functions within Drive to help you get around those spelling mistakes as you search in a hurry. When you make a
Google Drive Natural Language Searching
typing error, a suggested “Did you mean” word will come up which you can click and get the results with that correctly spelled word.
These new features will be rolling out to Drive online over the course of the next three days and the best way to figure out if you have it is to do some searching on your account. There is no word in the announcement if this new feature will be supported in Drive for Android.
