Inbox’s search feature is about to get a lot more useful soon
With Inbox, Google is doing everything they can to take the stress out of handling email. To their credit, they’ve made some huge strides, and they’re adding even more features to help improve that with each and every update.
But oddly enough, search — the foundation Google was built on — has remained pretty stale. Inbox’s search function works great when you already know what you’re looking for, but upon hitting the search box without a clue on what you want to type, all you’re presented with is a short list of recent searches.
Fine as that may be, Google wants to make that initial box more useful. Reports of a new search UI being tested have flown in. The box aims to deliver you a task from three areas:
- Contacts: Simply put, they’ll show you a list of contacts you have. We imagine clicking them will quickly bring up a compose box to shoot them an email, or perhaps an email history showing you your conversations with that person to reference old information. We’d also love it if these contacts were ordered by how often you email them.
- Businesses: Kind of like Contacts, but specifically for businesses.
- Refinements: This feature seems to make it easy to find the latest photos and attachments, email you’ve sent, unread email, email sent in a specific time period, and other categories that may apply.
Unfortunately, a lot of that is just assumptive commentary as we aren’t yet seeing this UI in Inbox. As such, it seems Google is doing some limited A/B server-side testing. Stay on the lookout for it on your end and let us know if you’re fortunate enough to be seeing the new UI on your side in the comments ahead.
[via Android Police]