I don’t know about you, but my Google Drive is a mess. It’s the digital equivalent of a hoarder’s under-the-bed stash of loose-leaf papers, scribbles on napkins, old car dealership brochures, and receipts to junk they threw out years ago.

If only there were an AI that was more geared toward searching than ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. Hmm. Hmmmmm. And if only it would link into your messy, messy Google Drive so that you could find the Word documents, folders, and spreadsheets that Drive’s own search bar doesn’t do so well with…

Perplexity AI announced earlier this week that it can now do just that.

a search-oriented ai for a digital mess

What Perplexity is calling the Google Drive Connector only works on Perplexity’s paid plans, so users of the free tier are out of luck. Using it lets you search “Drive files, email, calendar, other connected apps, and the web, without manual searches or context switching,” as Perplexity puts it.

Searching for images, videos, and audio files isn’t currently supported, but Perplexity’s inclusion of the word “currently” gives some hope of one or more of these features being implemented down the road.

Supported files that can be searched through the Google Drive Connector include Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides, Microsoft Office files (DOCX, XLSX, PPTX), PDFs, CSV files, Markdown files, JSON files, and Text (TXT) files.

Like Google, love Google, or hate Google, its omnipresence can’t be ignored or overlooked. Even if you keep a wide distance from Google Drive and instead use Apple iCloud, Dropbox, or Microsoft OneDrive, even if you swear off storing documents in the cloud entirely, you’re going to run into somebody who makes liberal use of Google Drive or its cloud-connected apps, such as Google Sheets and Google Docs.

When somebody barrages you with a bunch of Drive files, through work or otherwise, at least you’ll be able to find what you need more quickly. That is, if you’re a Perplexity subscriber.