For anyone who has felt the frustration of trying to find a particular file buried somewhere in their Google Drive storage, a new update to the iOS app should bring some welcome relief. Google announced on Friday that it has overhauled the search experience within the Drive app, adding new filtering options that allow users to narrow down results by file type, owner, and date modified.

The changes are seemingly small but represent a significant quality-of-life improvement for those who store lots of documents, videos, images, and other files in their Google Drive cloud storage. Previously, filtering options were limited and rather clunky to navigate. Now, a simple dropdown menu appears above the search results, giving users the ability to quickly refine what they’re looking for.

For example, if you were searching for a video file shared by a particular colleague last month, you could first filter by the “Video” file type, then choose that coworker’s name under “Owners,” and finally set a custom date range for “Last Modified” to find files from the relevant time period. The app will even attempt to suggest relevant filters as you type your search query.

The new filtering menus show up both before and after performing a search, allowing you to further refine results on the fly. It may not seem like a groundbreaking feature, but for anyone who has spent long minutes scrolling through pages of search results looking for that one elusive file, these dropdowns could be a game-changer.

The improved Google Drive search functionality is available now for anyone using the iOS app version of the service, including Google Workspace customers (individuals and businesses), consumer subscribers, and personal Google account holders. Google says the new filters will eventually make their way to the Android version of Drive as well, although no specific timeline was provided.

One of the most welcome changes is the switch to the more traditional dropdown-style menus for selecting filters. Google’s previous implementation used cumbersome swipeable filters that were far more fiddly to work with, especially on a smaller mobile screen. As the saying goes, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it – dropdown menus may be a conceptually simple UI element, but sometimes the classics are classics for a good reason.

Of course, while filters for file type, owner, and date modified cover a lot of the most common use cases when hunting for a particular file, there is still room for Google to expand the filtering capabilities further. Being able to sort by other criteria like file size, specific date ranges (e.g. filtering for files created this week versus choosing a custom range), or custom metadata could make Google Drive searches even more powerful and efficient.

Still, the current update is a solid step in the right direction for making the Google Drive experience less of a headache, especially for those who use it to store a large number of files across different types of content. Between this and other upcoming improvements like prompting for Drive storage cleanup, Google seems to be putting some welcome focus on optimizing the cloud storage service that so many of its users rely on daily.