Google Search on your Android device just got a whole lot more powerful. The Search team announced that a new feature named In Apps is now rolling out to the app on Android devices that will allow you to search content within apps installed on your phone. Now you can search for a contact for example and find that contact along with being able to see all the messages that you have had with that contact in the various apps you have used to contact them. Perhaps even more useful, you can search for a subject from an email and Search will interrogate Gmail to find that email. Essentially this new feature eliminates the need to do per-app searching (if that is possible) and takes it to the system level.
To use this new feature, you will need to open up the Google Search app on your phone and at the top, use the sliding menu just under the search bar to go to In Apps. This is on the far right of the menu. Right now the feature is limited to Gmail, Spotify and YouTube but the list of apps in the pipeline is pretty impressive according to the Search teams blog post.
In App Content Searching in Google Search
Today this experience works with apps like Gmail, Spotify and YouTube. In the coming months, we’ll also be adding more apps, including Facebook Messenger, LinkedIn, Evernote, Glide, Todoist and Google Keep.
Perhaps equally as important is that all of this searching in your apps is happening on the device itself. That means you can be offline and still get results from different apps.
This new feature of Search is a behind-the-scenes change so there is nothing you need to do. So long as you have the latest version of the Google app on your phone (an update was released late last week) then you should see it appear once it hits your account.
