Rediscovering Google Cloud Search
Google Cloud Search offers a quiet form of productivity: not by summarising, but by helping you find exactly what you’ve created across your own Google Workspace. A reminder that clarity comes before interpretation.
Google Search is changing fast. What used to be a tool for finding things is increasingly becoming a tool for summarising them and it is powered by Gemini and other AI layers that tell you what they think you need to know.
That’s useful, but it also blurs the original purpose of search: helping you locate the exact source, not its interpretation.
A Different Kind of Search
Only today I discovered Google Cloud Search, a different creature altogether. It doesn’t summarise but it retrieves. Within Google Workspace it quietly indexes your own universe of files: Drive documents, Gmail attachments, even calendar entries. It’s fast, private, and entirely focused on access rather than explanation.
Clarity Before Interpretation
For me, that distinction is refreshing. Once the right item is found, Gemini or another assistant can summarise, extract, or act on it. But Cloud Search handles the foundational step, that is finding the thing itself, and does so remarkably well.
It’s surprising how little attention this service receives. The interface may look utilitarian, but it offers something essential that modern AI search often forgets: clarity before interpretation.
Rob Hoeijmakers
Rob Hoeijmakers