Gmail search gets worse as Google forces AI powered results on users
Google is once again injecting AI where it doesn’t really belong. This time, sadly, it’s Gmail search -- something many of us use often. The search giant has started rolling out a change that sorts email search results by “most relevant” instead of the usual chronological order, and to be honest, it feels more like a nuisance than a helpful upgrade.
According to Google, this new AI-powered system will take things like recency, click behavior, and frequent contacts into account when surfacing results. In theory, that sounds useful. In practice, however, it will probably just bury what you’re actually looking for under a pile of algorithmic guesses.
There’s now a toggle that lets you switch between “most relevant” and “most recent,” but the fact that Google decided to make the AI version the default says a lot. This isn’t about giving users control -- it’s about pushing machine learning into yet another product just because it can.
Some folks (psychopaths) might appreciate the change, but for people who rely on muscle memory and fast chronological scanning, this AI sorting just slows things down. Finding a specific email used to be a straightforward task. Now it’s filtered through a black box of guesswork.
The update is rolling out to personal Google accounts first, with business users supposedly getting it later. It works across both the web and the official Gmail apps on Android and iOS, so there’s really no escaping it if you’re already in the ecosystem.
This is just the latest example of tech companies chasing AI buzzwords while messing with features that already worked fine. Not everything needs to be “smarter” -- sometimes we just want it to work the way we expect. Please?
Image Credit: Ollyy / Shutterstock