One thing has always annoyed me about Hangouts: there's no search option. How can you have a messaging service and not allow people to search through their conversations inside the service?! That's beyond comprehension. Of course there's a way to circumvent it by searching through chats in Gmail. But that neither was intuitive nor made sense unless you were familiar with the feature.

According to screenshots we've received from a test preview version of Allo, Google's new messaging app doesn't suffer from that silly limitation. Search is well implemented and it's universal throughout the app. There's a search icon on the top right of the main screen that lets you look for a contact/group's name (in case you have lots of chats and need to quickly find a specific person/group) or any word(s) inside a chat.

We're told that the search function is quite extensive, not only encompassing things you've typed and letting you navigate through multiple results in the same chat (left and middle screenshots below, respectively), but also going through Assistant's automated messages too (right screenshot below). So you could even find Assistant's answers and suggestions with a simple search.

Based on this test preview version of Allo, this is another functional feature that wasn't available in Hangouts and that's now implemented in Allo. The other one we've covered was the option to delete sent and received messages from the chat history on your phone.