What does Google do best? Search! Google is so smart it even predicts that you are looking for Google Drive when you accidentally type in Google Drev or other misspellings. Try it out. In Google Drive you can search at the top for files. Misspell a word you are looking for, it might be able to locate the file anyway!
Searching in Google Drive
When you search in Google Drive it searches the ENTIRE document. The title and the body of the document! How many of your documents say “Untitled” in your Google Drive? Click here to find out. Even though all of those documents are untitled they are still searchable. Search for anything you know was in the document and it is going to come up in the search.
OCR
Drive even looks for pictures. I searched for the word bike in my Google Drive. It came up with this screenshot that has the word bikes in the screenshot. Google is using OCR, optical character recognition, to read the text out of your images even!
Narrow the Search
Notice when you search in Google Drive that it provides me ways to filter the search even further. Click on “File type” and indicate you only want documents or that you only want images. Click on “Title only” to return documents that have that keyword in the document name. This will skip ones that only mention it in the actual document itself.
Filter Before You Search
Notice in the search bubble at the top of Google Drive is an icon that looks like 3 lines with some adjustment bars on it. That is your filter icon. Click on that icon to allow you to search only for a certain type of document or other elements. One of my tips is to STAR your originals. This way when you search you can check the checkbox for “Starred” and only YOUR files will come up. You could search for Owner:me, however, student work from Google Classroom makes you the owner when they turn in the document. So filter your search for “Starred” and only find the files you think are important.
Follow Up
In a Google Doc when adding a comment you can assign it to a particular person. Search your Google Drive for documents that are needing follow up! This is a good habit to get into. What do people expect you to be working on? Do not drop the ball! You can find them all easily with a simple Google Drev search.