Google’s Files app recently added a new Smart Search option. It’s supposed to make it easier to find information in documents and images that would otherwise be complicated to search for using just the file name. While the option to turn on Smart Search has been rolling out for a while now, we’re only now getting the full picture of how it works.
To reiterate, Smart Search uses local machine learning capabilities to enhance search in Files. In the app’s settings, the feature is described as a way to “get better search results with automatic scanning of your on-device file content.” In a recent Play Store changelog, Google goes into much more depth on what the feature offers:
What’s new
We are testing advanced search capabilities to make finding files easy. If you have Smart Search in app Settings, try the new search using:
Text from images and PDFs
Location & objects from images
- Artist, album and title from audio & video
View images in Ultra HDR for phones supporting it
See files received with Nearby Share grouped in Recents, Downloads and other categories
While Smart Search still hasn’t rolled out for everyone, we’ve been able to go hands-on with the feature. If you use Files to organize your data on your phone, Smart Search might be a game changer and make Files more useful than many file browsers on desktop operating systems.
For PDFs and images that have been saved to your phone for a while, text recognition is largely very reliable. No matter how meaningless and unintelligible the file name is, you can find important documents by using keywords within it. This also works for photos and screenshots with text in them, significantly reducing the amount of scrolling and tapping you need to do to find older buried data.
For images, you’re able to also search for objects. For example, you can search for “cats” to find all the images Files recognized with your feline friends in them. Based on our testing, this doesn’t work quite as well as it does in Google Photos, which is capable of finding friends and family based on their names if you’ve saved them to the service. Files’ method works fully offline on your device, so it looks like that’s the privacy trade-off you’re going to have to make. We also weren’t able to find photos based on locations, as promised in the changelog.
There are some limitations with Smart Search. Files only runs scans periodicallyaccording to a help page, with Google saying that it might take a few days until the feature is fully available for use when you first turn it on. This also means that newly downloaded or added files aren’t included in search results (or, more precisely, only show up when you search for file names and not contents). It doesn’t look like there is a manual way to kick the scanning process into gear.
It looks like it’s still early days for Smart Search, given that there are some annoying limitations at this stage. When it works, it’s a much more comfortable way to sift through downloaded data on your phone, though, making it possible to search for specific information rather than remembering or changing file names to make it easier.
Rajesh Pandey contributed to this story
