Google Files getting Smart Search to find text and objects inside images and documents

Google Files (officially called ‘Files by Google’) app is getting a Smart Search feature that offers more powerful content search capabilities, even being able to find images and documents that have a certain text or object.

Perhaps you have ever wanted to search for a particular document or image without knowing its name. For those cases, the new Google Files ‘Smart Search’ feature does a complete scan within your stored content.

It’s noteworthy that Google Files already offered options based on its ability to scan the content within images. For example, the ‘Clean’ section identifies blurry photos, memes, and even duplicate files that you can delete if you wish (by selecting one by one or all at once).

Now, these advanced scanning capabilities have been extended with Smart Search, although it has not yet reached all users. Even the dedicated app section on Play Store indicates that the Google team is still ‘testing’ it:

To find out if you have already received the feature, you just have to go to the Google Files app settings and try to find the ‘Smart Search’ switch. If it is not there, you will have to wait a little longer to be able to use it, but once you get it you can use it through the classic search box.

Smart Search possibilities allow you to find images that contain some specific text inside (not just in the file name). It will also offer image results based on keywords you use, such as images that include a phone if you type the keyword ‘phone’ in the search box, as tested by Android Central:

For documents (limited to PDF files for now), the feature will return results that include bits of text you type in the search box, making it especially useful for files for which you remember the contents but not the name. Google’s blog adds more use cases, like finding a downloaded e-ticket using keywords like ‘airline’ or ‘airport’.

The entire file scanning process is local, so you don’t have to worry about uploading all your storage to the cloud for Smart Search to work.

These types of features are really useful and show Google’s expertise regarding AI-powered features, being especially impressive in this case since it does not depend on the cloud but everything runs locally.