Google solves one of the biggest problems we've always had with Gmail.
Google continues to improve Gmail's usability by introducing a long-awaited change. Finally, using the right technology, the company has resolved the issue and improved the tool's performance.
It's good to see that Gmail, which has been a leader in free email for years, isn't standing still in its quest to improve. Google is always looking for new ways to improve usability, and it seems to have found the right solution thanks to artificial intelligence. Naturally, AI is the trend of the moment, and once again, we see Google capitalizing on it.
- Better search system
If you've been using Gmail for years, you've probably accumulated a decent amount of emails, either organized into folders or all in your inbox. If your email address is 0 or close to 0, you're a true hero. Conversely, it's common to have a large number of emails, and searching through them can become an epic adventure.
Typically, when we search for emails in Gmail, the tool displays results in order of access, with the most recent at the top. The theory is that this is a good idea. After all, what we need to find are likely the most recent messages. But, as you can imagine, we don't always search for those most recent messages. Sometimes, even when we use other search options, such as entering the name of the person we're searching for or a specific subject, we still can't find messages quickly.
What Google wants to do is solve this problem so we can use Gmail better and make our searches more successful. To achieve this goal, artificial intelligence comes into play and serves the user by displaying the most relevant results instead of the most recent ones.
- How does it work?
Artificial intelligence offers us all its intelligence so we can trust it and find the messages we're looking for with a higher success rate. So, while recent messages will still be relevant, Gmail will also take other factors into account. Among these, the AI algorithm will evaluate how frequently we receive or send emails from specific people, as well as the email open rate. If we receive a large number of messages from a store we never open, the AI will understand that we're not interested in them, and when we search for them, it will dismiss them as relevant, regardless of how recent the messages are.
So, what AI does is put itself in the user's shoes and try to figure out which of the emails we've collected will generate the most interest. These emails, which score the most "points" in the algorithm's evaluation process, will be the ones that appear at the top of the results we get from Gmail searches. So, while the latter will still be important, there will now be a greater number of factors influencing your search.
It appears that searching for the most relevant messages will become the new standard, although there will be a tab that allows users to perform traditional searches for the most recent messages. This will give users the option to use an AI algorithm to refine their searches or continue using the tool as before.
We don't know when this search improvement will be available in Gmail, but we checked to see if it was available, but it wasn't. It could arrive at any time with an update, so stay tuned!