
Gmail in personal search results  - skbohra123
https://www.google.com/experimental/gmailfieldtrial
======
kevinpet
Even if opt-in, this could be a privacy disaster because people won't consider
the consequences. Letting a friend use a computer to look something up in
google is something we do all the time. Oh, whoops, turns out there's your
email inviting a friend to the swinger's club that happens to be on the same
street as the restaurant you're going to lunch at.

~~~
agscala
That's not really a big deal seeing as how I can just click on the big ol'
GMAIL button in the top-left and go straight to my friend's inbox if I really
wanted to see his email anyways.

~~~
barista
What is different is that you are intentionally spying on your friend if you
did that. Here, your friend is unintentionally revealing contents of his inbox
to you.

~~~
lawdawg
considering the gmail results are hidden and require clicking on a link to
show them, its not much different than opening up your friends email now is
it?

------
mtgx
I don't like this move. Why are they trying to mix private info with public
info once again? Haven't they learned that people don't like this?

~~~
nolok
As long as you can disable it if you don't like it, as you can with the
google+ linking, I don't really see a problem. If it's forced onto you then
yes, get out of here.

> Haven't they learned that people don't like this?

SOME people.

Search is changing all the time, and it seems to happen faster every year. The
two big dogs these days are mixing search with social/your data, and smarter
results (custom result format and details depending on the subject, for
exemple).

Google knows it and make sure to stay on top of the game, frankly not doing it
would be the stupid move (one that so many big companies seems to end up doing
one day). To be honest I'm even surprised they take the time to make sure you
can disable most of this stuff or request verbatim search and things like
that, I'm sure it only accounts for a marginal percentage of their visitors
(although I'm one of them).

------
jkn
It looks like Google is turning its search engine into a global Spotlight,
blurring the distinction between a personal computer and the internet. Or
rather, making the concept of a personal computer irrelevant, which I think is
a stated goal of theirs.

~~~
rryan
Search is basically becoming a modern version of Google Desktop.

------
jasonkolb
I have wanted this for a long time. When I'm looking for information it's
incredibly useful to have email results returned as well as web. Not to
mention the fact that emailing things to myself just became infinitely more
useful.

~~~
stephengillie
This is the exact opposite of what I want. When I'm looking for information
it's highly irrelevant for my email to show in my results. If I'd wanted
something that was in my email, I'd just search there instead. This is
actually motivating me to find a different email host.

~~~
freehunter
I email myself stuff all the time just as a "fyi" personal cloud bookmark
service. Even disregarding that use case, sometimes I'll think "I know I saw
this somewhere" but not know where. If it was emailed to me and I don't
remember that it was emailed, I won't even think to search Gmail for it. It's
not like you're giving Google any more information than they already have.

------
Iaks
I specifically use the web search bar, instead of the gmail search bar,
because I want web results.

This strikes me as an enormous case of optimizing for users that search for
google.com in the web search bar. Maybe people do get confused around which
search space they are accessing - I certainly do not. I really hope this
either stays in beta forever, or at least has a toggle in the account settings
to disable it.

~~~
Lewisham
I think it's a great feature. "I remember reading something about X. Was it on
Google+? Was it a blog post? Was it in my email?" Now you don't have to hit a
number of services. I think your assumption, even for you, that you remember
the source of a piece of information is faulty.

I search email a lot, and having access to it from a standard browser
address/search bar is much shorter.

~~~
Matt_Cutts
I do that all the time too. I don't want to have to act like a mini-search
engine myself and ask "Now where did I see that?" I just want to find the info
easily and quickly.

It's important to emphasize that this is a field trial that people can request
to join. We're going to keep the trial relatively small (~1 million people) so
that we can collect feedback to make sure that the product is really helpful
and that it doesn't surprise people.

I've already seen the product become much more useful just from internal
feedback, so I'm looking forward to what the field trial participants have to
say.

~~~
joelhaus
Hey Matt, Been waiting years for this, it's much appreciated.

Any plans to include Google Drive results too? I'm opted in to the _Apps
Search_ lab in Gmail, so it would nice if that applied to universal web search
results too.

In case anyone is wondering, the "Apps Search" lab[0] in Gmail is described as
follows:

    
    
      Extends search with Google Docs and Sites results.
      Apps Search will find the most relevant Docs and
      Sites and show them below Gmail search results.
    

[0] <https://mail.google.com/mail/ca/u/0/#settings/labs>

~~~
Matt_Cutts
Great point--Liz Gannes asked that question at the event, and the answer she
got was that we'd like to explore offering things like Docs or calendar
information as well. Gmail seemed like the best place to start for the field
trial though in terms of useful information to surface.

------
stfu
Google slowly but surely forces me into a standard two-browser setting. So far
the highlight of the forced integration was the YouTube auto login, now with
this option enabled it is going to get even worse.

But on the positive side this implementation reminds people with each and
every search query how much data Google already has on them.

~~~
fl3tch
After YouTube auto login was implemented, I started using a cookie manager.
With one or two clicks you can enable or disable cookies, which logs you in or
out. I don't want every random reddit video that I click on to show up in my
YouTube history, so generally I leave it blocked except for when I actually
want to view my subscriptions on YouTube.

Also, a fast way to do a logged out Google search, without switching browsers
or entering private browsing mode, is to bookmark one of the IP addresses in
the 74.125.225.0/25. Since cookies are domain specific and you're not on
google.com, you'll be logged out.

~~~
TeHCrAzY
But do you really think Google can't correlate between IP address, browser
signature and your account?

~~~
simonbrown
Since most people (probably) just stay logged-in, would it really be worth the
effort?

------
whichdan
I don't like this either; hopefully we can disable it at the very least.

I do like that flight tracking view, though. That's what I'd like to see more
of - making email/search more useful, not more integrated.

------
duaneb
Could someone explain why this is so bad? I see no privacy problems - people
still can't access your data without logging in to your email.

~~~
sp332
It's a privacy issue because if anyone uses my computer to do a simple Google
search to show me something, they'll see content from my emails.

~~~
tonfa
I never let people use my cookies. I always start an anonymous window to let
people use my browser (especially since most of the time, they'll want to
check their email and go to gmail...).

~~~
barista
Good for you. I bet majority of non-tech savvy people don't do this or even
know how to do this

------
apawloski
While I'm not too happy with this feature, it looks like this is the direction
Google is going with SPYW and there's not much we can do about it. Serious
question for the privacy folks -- is there a service as good as Gmail that
doesn't come with similar baggage? (For some reason this upset someone enough
to downvote, but I promise this isn't rhetorical.)

To Google's credit though, these features are fairly straightforward to
disable. I'm using their service, and I respect that these are their decisions
to make, but I appreciate that I have a choice. Facebook and Quora are recent
examples of more unilateral "if you don't like it then tough" policies.

------
mikenon
If I had two groups of users, one that paid for my products and one that
didn't, I would move mountains to make sure that paid users weren't excluded
from new features. Why does Google continually give free users first access?

~~~
duaneb
Google gets most of its revenue, by a long shot, from its free users.

~~~
mikenon
Undoubtedly. However, unless the average free user's eyeballs are worth more
than ~$50/yr, any given paid user is more valuable than an identical free
user.

------
adamtulinius
"not available on Google Apps accounts"

At least this is a feature I'm not going to be longing after (but seriously,
somebody at Google should figure out how to include apps users into previews
like these..)

------
pasbesoin
Shades of Google Desktop (their local search application). Only now, it's not
a matter of whether or not you install it -- you're dependent upon Google
providing and properly managing an "opt out" option.

Yes, the information is already on their servers. This is a reminder that,
once that is the case, you may or may not be or remain in control of how it is
blended.

I'm not going to make an argument for "good or bad", here. Just the reminder
that we've seen this before.

------
sp332
I wish you could enable this per-computer. I would leave it disabled for my
work computer, and probably enable it on my laptop.

------
giulianob
As for the video, is that basically Google Now for iOS?

------
chimeracoder
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this so far, but isn't this just begging
Apple to sue them directly on the same grounds for which they're suing Samsung
(ie, universal search)?

------
barista
I thought Google's goal was to be as creepy as possible but not creepier?

