The Google search app in your Android phone has been a “to go” app for all your search and lookup needs. With the voice recognition feature also being made available, it has become one of the most widely used apps in the smartphone space. If you think you have already seen the very best of this Google search app, think again.
Google has been working on a way to make this app display results much faster, though the response time primarily depended on the speed (read bandwidth) of the Internet connection be it the Wi-Fi or the mobile data connection. The next improvement is based on the fact that most of the information or content that we look for is usually saved in the mobile apps that we used in our smartphones (either in the data records or the cache). Google is trying to index the information contained in the installed apps and make them accessible to the Google Search app.
If you have already tried the existing search modes in the Google app, the newest one is the “In Apps” mode. This is the latest addition to the Google search app features that will allow you to search for content such as messages, contacts, tasks, music, notes, videos etc. within the mobile apps installed in your phone. This would be especially useful to track details that you remember you had transmitted or saved using any of the apps installed in the smartphone. It could be a message sent or a chat conversation through an installed app or even a song or video that you played using a music player / video player app.
As of now, the “In Apps” search feature is limited to Gmail, YouTube, and Spotify. However, Google has notified that it is working towards adding LinkedIn, Facebook Messenger, Glide, Evernote, Todoist, and Google Keep to the list of apps that can be “searched in” by the Google search app. You can expect to “search in” these apps in the coming months.
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This would take your search experience to an all new level, wherein if you know that it is there in your smartphone, you can easily find it, irrespective of which app you had used to access it in the previous instance. Much different from the typical Google searches, that take place on remote servers, the “In Apps” search takes place completely on your smartphone, reducing the dependency on the Internet connection. Further, this also ensures that your private information is not sent to Google, and you can search for information even when you are offline.
You also get to configure which apps should be featuring in the “in apps” search feature by going to the Google App’s Settings and toggling the setting for various apps on or off. This way you remain in total control over the source of the information that you want to be searched from. Welcome to the world of offline “in apps” search!
