Google searching ‘I lost my phone’ will let people find their lost handset

The site lets you see the location of your device or remotely remove access to your accounts if you think it might have been stolen

The new chat app will be released this summer (Chris Jackson/Getty Images)

Simply searching for “I lost my phone” will now help anyone find it again.

Google has introduced new tools intended to make it easier for people to find their devices if they get lost.

Searching for the phrase will now bring up a special page that includes all of the devices that Google has a record of you owning. On there, you can click on the one that you think has been lost.

From that page, you can choose to take some steps like showing its location on a map or locking the screen.

Some of those features only work on Android devices. If the handset is an iPhone, then it encourages people instead to head to Find My iPhone on iCloud.

That service is offered by Apple and does much the same as Google’s tool. It displays the phone on a map and allows users to tell it to play a sound or to turn on “lost mode” so that it can tell anyone who finds it where it needs to be returned.

Google can still perform some services for an iOS device, like locking out the Google accounts so that if it is has been stolen whoever has it won’t be able to read your email.

The site has also added easier ways of getting to the account hub, which shows much of the data and preferences that Google has for a person. People can just say to their phone “OK Google, show me my account”, and they’ll be taken to the hub and find that information.