Summary
- Google is updating Gmail search with AI to provide more relevant results based on user interactions and frequency of contact.
- The new algorithm prioritizes emails of interest to the user by factoring in more than just recency.
- Users can switch between the new “Most Relevant” view and the old “Most Recent” view if they prefer.
Pretty much everyone has a Gmail account, but if you’ve used it for years, it can be hard to go back tens or even hundreds of thousands of emails to find a specific email, or a specific file within an email. Now, Google is finally putting some care into Gmail’s search feature.
Gmail is implementing an updated search feature that leverages artificial intelligence to provide users with more relevant results. Normally, search results within Gmail are mostly shown in chronological order. While that’s good for surfacing stuff that was recently sent to you, it’s also inefficient if you need to go back a few months or years to get to something. The new system wants to focus, instead, on “relevancy” instead of just recency alone.
Recency will still be one factor (there wouldn’t be much of a point in surfacing an email from a decade ago if it’s not what you’re looking for), but the new AI algorithm will also take into account user interaction (most-clicked emails), and the frequency of contact with specific senders. The goal is to prioritize emails that are most likely to be of interest to the user, effectively placing them at the top of the search results.
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Because Gmail has more to offer than just sending and receiving emails.
This means that instead of sifting through a long list of emails that contain the search term, you might see the emails you are most likely to need much sooner. For instance, if a user frequently communicates with a particular colleague and searches for a project, emails from that colleague regarding the project will likely appear higher in the results. Recent emails related to the search query will be given more weight than older ones, preventing users from having to scroll through outdated information, but it won’t be the only factor at play.
By factoring in a wider range of signals beyond simple keyword matching, the improved search functionality should better understand user intent and therefore deliver more accurate results. If you prefer the older view for whatever reason (for one, there might be an email that surfaced easily before that’s now buried—it’s AI and mistakes can happen, after all), you will still be able to switch back to “Most Recent” from the new “Most Relevant” view.
If this works right, it could be a great improvement to my Gmail experience. I tend to treat my email history as an archive containing important files and emails from previous years that I still frequently reference/use. Sometimes, however, it can be hard for me to look up some stuff, because I often find that it’s buried among other not relevant emails because it has something in the email’s body that barely matches my search term. You might have also needed to use search operators like from:, older:, or newer: every once in a while to get to a specific email. Frequent clicks on the same email/sender should be a factor in this new algorithm, so I expect this part to get at the very least much better.
Google has not clarified when this new search experience within Gmail will roll out. I don’t see it yet on my end, but we’d guess it’ll take a few weeks or months to pop up for everyone. To see if you already have it, make sure to update your app and search for something inside the app once you’ve done so.
