Finding Research Sources in NotebookLM Is Getting Even Easier

NotebookLM just received a major upgrade to the way you find and add sources to your notebooks. Announced on Thursday, the update follows additional new features added to its mobile app and a significantly better chat experience.

The note-taking and research assistant powered by Gemini is easily one of its best AI tools. It’s easy for everyone to understand, and despite the focus on school and study-related features, it’s useful for school, work, and play.

Sources are at the heart of NotebookLM, as they form the basis of any notebook you create. And that’s what makes NotebookLM unique: it will only provide answers and generate content based on the sources you feed it. With this update, these sources are easier to find and add. Here are the new features.

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Discover more sources with Deep Research

If you’re trying to bring together multiple sources for a research project, you can now let Deep Research do the work for you. Here’s what it does and how to use it.

In the source panel:

Select the canvas as a new source

From here you can choose your search style:

Quick search: As the name suggests, choose this option for a quick search to discover sources.

In-depth research: If you want a complete and in-depth briefing and analysis, choose Deep Research. It will take longer, but you can add your own sources while it searches in the background for quality, relevant sources for your notebook.

Whether you choose Fast or Deep Research, you will be presented with a summary of its results, along with a series of sources that you can choose to import into your notebook.

More file types are now supported

Google has slowly been expanding support for the types of sources you can add to a notebook, but it just released a handful of highly requested ones.

You can now add Google Sheets and Microsoft Word Document (.docx) files to a notebook, the latter feature being in high demand. Additionally, you can now add PDFs and other files that you have uploaded to Google Drive without having to download them to your computer and re-upload them to NotebookLM. Instead, you can add the Drive file URL or select it when adding sources from Google Drive.