Google’s Inbox for Gmail app has always done a good job of showing you emails that are important, instead of just any old emails that arrive in your inbox.
But the Inbox app gained an extra set of smarts this week with a new feature that extracts exact pieces of information from your files and displays them at the top of your Gmail search results.
So if you’re looking for a bill payment confirmation or an upcoming flight schedule, Inbox will clip that data for you from your emails, eliminating the need for you to sort through filtered search results.
The new feature is similar to one that Google has on its main search engine. If you’re logged into your Google account and search for “itinerary,” for example, Google will fish through your data and publish your personal upcoming flight or hotel reservations directly on the search results page.
“Emails can contain all sorts of important information,” Gmail product manager Govind Kaushal wrote in a blog post on Tuesday. “The challenge is, these bits of info are often buried inside larger conversations.”
Google knows that as more of our lives are planned and managed online, small improvements like this one can help save time and energy. Last year, the company tried to do the same by building a tool that scans emails and suggests a reply.
