Google's Inbox App Now has Smarter Search Results
Spend less time digging through the disaster that is your email account.

Google's Inbox may take a bit of getting used to, especially if you've been using the plain vanilla Gmail interface for years, but once you dig in there's a lot of powerful and useful features to find. (Some of them can get a little weird, though.) Today, Google is releasing some tweaks to make Inbox's search feature more useful. For starters, when you look for something like a shipping tracking number, frequent flyer number, hotel reservation, bill or a number of other pieces of info that are buried somewhere in your email account, Inbox will surface it at the top of your search results.

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It pops that info up in a card that looks quite similar to the information Inbox intelligently surfaces from your emails. The thinking goes that email users search their messages for specific info like this pretty frequently, so anything Google can do to surface that data quicker is a win. Along with the most pertinent bit of data that you're searching for, Inbox will also feature a quick link directly to the email you're looking for if you need to see it in its full context.

Below those quick results, Inbox will show a section of "top results," with and the full chronological search results will be displayed below that. The Inbox team is confident that between the new "quick answers" and top search results, you won't need to dig into the full search details very often, though there's no word on exactly how it decides what emails to show in your top results.

If you've seen these features already, it's because Google has done a bit of testing with them already -- the company says that it made some notable improvements in its search ranking algorithms as they apply to email in the past few months. Now that they've completed the testing, these features are rolling out to all users, both in the Inbox app for Android and iOS as well as on the web.