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Google Drive Chrome Plugin

Introduction

The Google Drive Dual-Pane Overlay plugin offers you two main areas of functionality, designed to help you organize, browse, and find your files faster and smarter than ever before.

1. Hierarchical Folder Navigation

With the Dual-Pane Overlay, you get a live, collapsible tree view of your entire Google Drive, including:

  • All Folders: See your Drive’s structure at a glance, with folders and subfolders displayed in a sidebar.
  • Shortcuts: Easily spot and follow Drive shortcuts using arrow icons.
  • Quick Navigation: Jump between folders with a single click, or expand any folder to see its contents.
  • Preview Documents: Click on any file to preview it instantly, or open it in a new window for editing.
  • One-Click Navigation: Move up a folder level with a simple back arrow—no more endless clicking or lost context.

2. Tailored Search

The plugin also turns your Google Drive into a lightning-fast, on-device search engine that’s as smart as you need it to be. With the plugin search functionality you can:

  • Search Inside Google Docs: Instantly search through the full text and headings of every Google Doc you can access.
  • Find Any File: Look up other file types (PDFs, images, Office docs, etc.) by name.
  • Category Filters: Assign custom keywords to documents for category-based searching and easy filtering.
  • Advanced Queries: Use instant, exact-phrase, or wildcard searches to get exactly the results you want.
  • Quick Reindexing: Rebuild your search index at any time, or let the plugin handle it automatically in the background.

Every search happens locally, so your privacy is always protected—your files and search data never leave your computer.

Installation Instructions

To install the Google Drive Dual-Pane Overlay plugin in Chrome, perform the following steps:

  1. Open Google Chrome.
  2. Go to the Chrome Web Store page for the extension: Google Drive Dual-Pane Overlay
  3. Click Add to Chrome, then confirm any prompts to complete the installation.

The plugin should now be installed and active.

You can check it has been installed by navigating to chrome://extensions/ 

Using Hierarchical Folder Navigation

Getting Started

  1. Navigate to Google Drive (https://drive.google.com/drive/home).
  2. There is a 10 second delay from the time you navigate to Google Drive till the plugin is activated, this is to allow you time to navigate to the required folder before the plugin becomes active.
    Note: There is also a 10 second delay in activating the plugin after navigating to a folder using a shortcut).
  3. Once the plugin becomes active, you will see the following view:

    Expanding a Folder

    To expand a folder, click on the triangle to its left. The expanded folder structure will display as follows:

    Shortcuts

    Shortcuts display with an arrow icon, click on the shortcut name to navigate to the destination folder:

    Document Preview

    To preview a document, click the document name in the left-hand hierarchical navigation structure.

    Click Open with Google Docs to edit the document.

    Searching Inside a Document

    To search a document in preview mode, click on the menu icon in the top right corner and then selecting Find:

    Opening the Document in a New Screen

    You can click on Open in New in the top right hand corner, to open the preview document in a new window.

    Navigating Up a Folder Level

    A backward-pointing arrow appears in the top-left corner; click on this arrow to navigate back up a directory level.

     

    Tailored Search for Google Drive

    The Google Drive Dual-Pane Overlay plug-in adds a self-contained, on-device search engine to the Google Drive page. It builds a local index of your documents (nothing ever leaves the computer) and gives you shortcuts for:

    • full-text search inside Google Docs
    • filename search across all other Drive items
    • category filtering with user-defined keywords
    • instant, exact-phrase, and wildcard queries
    • on-demand or automatic re-indexing
    WARNING

    Your browser may run slowly the first time the plugin builds the search database. Therefore it is advisable to install the plugin and access the Google Drive site and then leave the initial index build running while you are not using your computer.

    What the Search Index Contains

    Item Indexed fields
    Google Docs • Title

    • All headings at the levels you enable (H1-H6) 

    • 🔑 keywords (see § 4)
    Other files (PDF, Office, images, ZIP …) Filename only
    Folders Name and full path
    Incremental updates Only items whose modifiedTime has changed since the last crawl

     Crawls occur:

    • the first time you open Drive after installing or restarting Chrome
    • automatically every six hours
    • immediately when you press ♻ Refresh Index (see § 6)

    Configuring Which Headings Are Indexed

    You can include or exclude specific heading levels (H1 … H6) from the search database.

    1. Open the Plugin Options page: Navigate to chrome://extensions → Details → Extension Options
    2. Tick the heading levels to include. Unticking H2 also unticks H3-H6; ticking H4 ticks H1-H4 automatically.
    3. Click Save. The current index is marked stale; the next time you load Drive a full rebuild starts.
    Tip – Making ordinary text searchable

    Format any paragraph as Heading 6 (or another level you include) and then redefine that heading style to look identical to “Normal text”. It will be indexed without changing the visual layout of the document.

    Keyword-Based Document Classification

    Use 🔑 key emojis to tag a document with one or more categories. For example, add the following text anywhere into a document to categorize that document as “Marketing” and “Customer Service”.

    🔑Marketing,  Customer Service🔑

    • Place the tag line anywhere in the Doc.
    • Separate multiple keywords with commas.
    • The crawler reads the line during the next crawl and adds the keywords to a master list.
    • In the sidebar you can select one or more keywords to restrict results to documents that contain all selected tags.

    Running Searches

    Action How to do it
    Instant search Start typing in the search box; results refresh after 0.5 s of inactivity.
    Run immediately Press Enter or click 🔍 Search All Folders.
    Exact phrase Enclose the term in quotation marks: “project alpha”.
    Wildcard Use * within a word: doc* matches doc, docs, docker …
    Keyword filter Tick one or more keywords in the drop-down to combine content and category filters.

    How the Search Results are Sorted

    Search results appear in two groups.

    Group What it shows
    Exact Matches Files where your word or quoted phrase appears as a whole word. These rise to the top because they are usually what you want first.
    Partial Matches Files where the letters you typed appear only as part of a longer word (for example plan inside planning). They follow after the exact hits.

     Within each group, the most relevant files float to the top:

    1. Document title – If the title contains your term, the file is placed right at the front.
    2. Top-level headings (H1) – Hits in big section headings come next.
    3. Sub-headings (H2, H3, …) – The deeper the heading level, the lower it ranks.

    When two files are tied after this pass, they’re listed alphabetically.

    Managing the Search Index

    Method Trigger Effect
    Automatic Six hours since last successful crawl or previous crawl was interrupted Silent background rebuild at next Drive load
    Manual Click ♻ Refresh Index in the sidebar Deletes the current database and starts a full crawl immediately
    Config change Saving new heading-level settings Marks index stale; full rebuild on next Drive visit

    A status line beneath the search box shows progress: ⚙ Building → ♻ Re-indexing → ✅ Complete.

    Privacy and Storage

    All index data is saved in chrome.storage.local on the same machine and is never transmitted outside your browser session.

    Quick Reference (Cheat-Sheet)

    Need to… Do this
    Change which headings are searchable Options → tick heading levels → Save
    Tag a Doc for easy filtering Insert 🔑 Keyword1, Keyword2 🔑 anywhere
    Force an immediate re-index Click ♻ Refresh Index
    Find an exact phrase Search for “your phrase”
    Quickly include ordinary text in search Apply Heading 6 style and restyle it to look normal

     With these tools you can turn Google Drive into a fast, structured knowledge base tailored to the way you organise information.

    Managing the Plugin

    Toggling the Overlay

    A Drive Overlay toggle switch will appear in the top-left corner of Google Drive, click the toggle switch to turn the overlay ON or OFF.

    Closing the Plugin

    To close the plugin, Click the “X” in the top-right corner.

    Alternatively, you can close the plugin by pressing the Escape key (Esc) on your keyboard.