Google Chat and Gmail add labels to the new smart chip stack to simplify complex searches

Capitalizing on its smart chips for Gmail search, Google is now adding labels into the mix to make it easier than ever to stack search conditions and find emails easier. In a Workspace Updates blog post this week, the company revealed how it’s working to simplify its email client both on the web and mobile. Now, if it would just get rid of the two ads I have to delete every day at the top of each inbox, that would be great!

As you can see from the GIFs above, you’d traditionally slide the left-hand panel open and select a label to jump to it. Labels were built to be filtered email “folders”, so to speak. By moving them into the search chips section at the top of your primary inbox, it becomes immediately obvious that navigating and combining search modifiers is less cumbersome than before.

Additionally, Google is slightly changing the way searching your Gmail inbox works. When a search returns no results, it will now tell you more than “¯\_(ツ)_/¯” and will instead show you things that are related to what you typed in. In this way, I suppose you could say search is less specific and more “fuzzy”, for better or worse. It may just be the case that it’s fuzzy when and only when specific results can’t be found, and standard searches are unaffected.

Lastly, tapping the search box on mobile will now show you previous searches you’ve completed, recommended contacts that you frequently contact, and more. Obviously, this trick comes directly from standard Google web-based searches as the box there has suggestions and such as well. It’s good to see more consistency across the company’s products, at least in these basic areas.

These features are already available to all Google Account holders, both free and paid, regardless of whether they have a legacy or modern license. If you’re operating Gmail on your iOS device, you can expect to use labels as search chips, related searches, and more near the end of October as Google rolls it out a bit slower to its competitor’s audience.