Google Adds Your Your Gmail, Calendar & Files to Search
Want your personal emails strewn across your search results? Google thinks so.
After announcing a trial a few months ago, Google recently launched Gmail, Calendar & Google Drive integration into search, allowing you to see your files, events and emails when triggered by a relevant search term. Can you say creepy?
The changes also extend to Gmail search, where you’ll start seeing relevant Google Drive & Calendar results when searching for your emails. So basically, when you’re searching for something, Google will now start showing results from other products that may or may not be of a sensitive nature. Good move Google!
While the rollout is limited to users who have applied for the field trial at this stage, Google will no doubt be rolling out universal product search to users sometime soon, which begs the question: where does Google draw the line on privacy?
If you remember back to February, Google issued a new privacy policy that consolidated more than 60 separate privacy policies for different Google products into one easier-to-understand document. In announcing the new privacy policy Google said:
“Our new Privacy Policy makes clear that, if you’re signed in, we may combine information you’ve provided from one service with information from other services. In short, we’ll treat you as a single user across all our products.”
You agreed to it. Now suffer Google’s wrath!
Funnily enough, this isn’t the first time Google’s tried to un-silo their products and unite them all around search. Arriving in January, Google’s much-maligned ‘Search Plus Your World’ integrated Google+ posts into search results, bringing a social element to search that instantly backfired against the search giant.
So if SPYW was a disaster why are Google again attempting to push more of our personal lives into our search results? SPYW showed Google that it’s users overwhelmingly preferred to keep the two separate and each of these separate products already contain their own search functions, so what exactly is Google playing at?
What are your thoughts on Google bringing Google Drive & Gmail into search? Useful or annoying?
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
