Google, Inc. announced Monday at its Atmosphere Conference in Tokyo a redesign of its Google Sites service and a new app called Springboard that allows users to search through information they have stored on Google services.

Leading the announcement was the Springboard app which utilizes artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to allow users to search through the content of the documents they store in Google Drive, along with Google Apps including Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Contacts and others, all from the one place.

Although not entirely made clear, Springboard is also said to assist users throughout their workday by proactively providing useful and actionable information and recommendations.

Google Sites, Google’s hosted web page service it launched back in 2008 following its acquisition of JotSpot in 2006, is getting its first major refresh under the codename of Project Wiz, and will be redesigned to deliver users a highly interactive experience for building websites, with support for dragging and dropping elements around each site.

“With the new Google Sites, you can build beautiful, functional pages to aggregate and distribute content across your enterprise, optimized for every screen,” Google Apps Vice President of Engineering Prabhakar Raghavan explained in a blog post. “A new intuitive drag-and-drop design experience supports real-time collaboration by multiple editors, just like in Docs, and offers easy access to all your content from Calendar, Docs, Drive, Maps and more.”

“The new Sites also includes themes and layouts designed to scale and flex to any screen size, so they’re as useful when you access them on the 30-inch monitor at your desk or your smartphone on your commute.”

Going forward

The introduction of Springboard is representative of Google’s push into more advanced AI tools, and from its description sounds like it will be a welcomed addition to the Google Apps product lineup.

As for Google Sites, however, the refresh is long overdue.

Despite it rarely getting much in the way of attention (from the public as well as Google) the service is said to have a remarkable 240 million users, and this new version may spark a new wave of both interest and usage going forward.

The new services will not be available immediately however; Google Apps for Work customers are able to sign up through the Google Springboard Early Adopter Program or the Google Sites Early Adopter Program if they want to give either a shot, but for everyone else there has been no time frame given as to when they will be publicly available.

Image credit: Google.