Google has just added a neat new little feature to the Google Play Store on Android, and it’s a search bar. That may not sound very exciting, but the placement matters. This new search bar appears when you go into the reviews section of an app or game, allowing you to quickly search for specific keywords within all of the reviews other people left.
If you aren’t sure whether an app has a specific feature or how it behaves in a specific scenario, this is definitely a huge quality of life improvement, saving you the time needed to dig into countless reviews manually in order to find out just what you’re looking for.
Google Play Store’s new search bar for reviews
This new search bar has been in testing since November, and it’s now fully rolling out to everyone with a recent Play Store update. That said, keep in mind that Google’s software rollouts are notoriously slow, so if you don’t see this yet, don’t worry – it will arrive on your device too at some point, but that point might be days or weeks away. If you want to manually help the process along, go to the Play Store, tap your profile picture, then go to Settings > About > Update Play Store and make sure you’re on version 50.7.24-31.
To access the search bar, tap the ratings at the top of any app, then tap “See all reviews”. It will then show up at the top. Or you can scroll down to the Reviews and ratings section, then tap the magnifying glass icon under the AI-generated reviews summary. This will have the same effect. Once you enter at least a couple of words in the search bar, reviews that have those terms get listed below. Weirdly enough, it does have to be at least two words – if you only enter one this won’t work (we’re not sure if this is a bug or not).
Unfortunately, reviews also don’t populate as you type (at least not in this iteration of the feature), and as we already implied, the search only looks for reviews with specific matches to your query. It’s a good first step, but in the future it would of course be useful to have some semantic search support so you wouldn’t have to type exact terms. There are however suggestions shown under the search bar for popular queries.