Searching Google Drive just became much, much easier

Have you got a weighty Google Drive account loaded with all manner of files? Ever have trouble finding something in that sprawl? Well, Google just made searching for stuff much easier in Drive with the introduction of 'natural language processing'.

In other words, you can now phrase your search conversationally, as if you're asking a person to find something for you.

For example, let's say you can't remember the name of a particular spreadsheet file you worked on at the start of the year pertaining to your business budget. To locate it, you can now simply type 'find my budget spreadsheet from January'.

Google Drive will then clarify exactly what search you mean to conduct ('Did you mean: budget, Type: spreadsheets') and you can click to confirm and get the results. Or you can ask things like 'show me all presentations from Sarah', and so on.

Google Drive will learn from these queries as it goes along, so in time, the whole system will become more accurate and useful.

Autocorrect action

Another handy feature which has been implemented is the automatic correction of spelling errors in searches. So if you mistype and accidentally search for a 'buget' spreadsheet, Drive will clarify if you meant to search for 'budget', just as the Google search engine does.

Furthermore, a few extra tweaks have been made to Google Docs, including the ability to easily split a document into multiple columns. Also, Docs now automatically saves a copy of any type of non-Google file format you're working on.

All of these features are now rolling out across the globe, so you should see them soon enough – they're already live in our Google Drive account.

• Also check out our guide on how to use Google Drive