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Google’s going to start showing you relevant information from your Gmail when you perform a regular old Google search soon. But you can try it out now before it’s official.
Your email is basically a huge repository for information that you need. That’s where you store travel itineraries, party details, package tracking numbers, phone numbers, and countless other important bits of data. If you enable the trial, Google will pull relevant information from your emails and display it alongside your search results. Researching an upcoming trip, for example? Your airline confirmation email will pop up in a right-hand pane.
With the launch of Knowledge Graph earlier this year, Google’s whole approach to search changed. Folding Gmail into search results fits right in with the new mantra. Before, Google wanted to provide you links to information. Now it wants to scrape the sources and provide you with the information itself.
It’s a further uniting of your Google identity, which could be seen as a further depletion of your privacy. But Google heading this direction is inevitable, so the best we can all do is maybe sit back and enjoy the benefits while doing our best to forget the creepy negatives.
The trial is limited to users with @gmail.com email addresses, and it will only be available on Google.com in English. If you sign up and you don’t like it, you can later opt-out of the trial. No word on when a wider roll out might show up. [Google via The Next Web]
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Praise where praise is due. I have commented so many times about misleading or just plain incorrect headlines and opening text in articles before that I feel this article deserves a special mention for not doing what a lot of the net is doing with this story.
In many other places on the interwebs there are headlines and opening text that make it sound like Google is going to make your Gmail searchable BY EVERYONE. Of course they clarify it later on, once they have grabbed your attention and you have clicked on the article, but for once Giz has not done this. Well done Mario.
Do people seriously believe that Google would make your private email publicly searchable? What kinda moron would even insinuate that?
ZOMG!?!?!?! You can search my mail on Google now??
I guess that answers your question.:-)
Seriously though, you have to remember that a lot of people are credulous idiots, just look at the number of Nigerian scam stories where people actually forked out money. While the sites only aim may be to get you to click on a link (thus upping pageviews and ad impressions) many people don’t read further than the title and can then have a totally warped view of the truth, which they will then repeat to their similarly credulous friends. Before you know it there is a public outcry against something that isn’t even doing what these morons think it is and then the publicity hungry “causes” and politicians get involved, which takes it into tabloid territory, next thing you know you have a witch hunt.
The EU are banning curved bananas?! This is an outrage! Burn Europe!!
Exactly