Comment by blfr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blfr | Hacker News Reader

I'm always surprised how little Google manage to do with all that info. I have a personal Google Apps account and their absolute highest achievement from knowing nearly my entire location history over the past three years, searches, current position, having all the contacts, calendar, list of my apps, even purchase history (through email receipts if they wanted it) is Google Now occasionally correctly suggesting the next destination.

Other location suggestions? Crap unless explicitly entered in the Calendar. Article suggestions in Google Now? Crap. Despite having my entire Feedly info (300+ feeds) from which they pull most useless cards. Youtube suggestions in Google Now are somehow even worse than video suggestions in the Youtube app. Ads? Complete garbage and borderline fraud against all these companies paying to advertise mobile games which I almost never play and they know it.

Bizarrely, I have a Google Apps account at work with much, much less info and it's actually a little better.

> Article suggestions in Google Now? Crap

Not my experience at all, in my case the suggestions have become so good that I find myself checking what articles Google has for me multiple times a day. It's easily the thing I check the most after Reddit and Hacker News. Heck, I'd love a standalone app or service just for the article suggestions alone.

Same. Quite a few good articles. Even things that I wasn't looking for exactly. New trailers for games I've searched before, etc.

One of the most clueless things Google does is use general search queries to suggest articles in Google News.

Just because I search for something, say a business, on the web doesn't in any way mean that I'm interested in seeing future news stories about that business.

> Article suggestions in Google Now? Crap

I spend at least an hour every morning and night waking up and falling asleep to the latest news I'm interested in, with probably 1 or 2 additional hours throughout the day -- and all from article suggestions in Google Now.

If you aren't seeing things that interest you, you can tap the dropdown menu in the top-right of each card and tap "I'm not interested in this" or "Not interested in this source" to train it towards articles that you actually do care about.

Interesting that you say that. I've seen Google to suggest some interesting and relevant information in the last few years. I use a Windows phone now so I can't comment on Google Now since the desktop/browser version didn't really take off.

I have my calendar and email setup on my phone with contacts sync also enabled. When I get to work I have one of those pinned tabs on chrome set to inbox and all my searches on my phone and laptop are on Google. Adblocker is installed on my laptop so I never see ads there but after searching for property and a bed for the last few weeks, the ads I seem to be getting on my mobile browser point to just that. I've actually ended up buying a couple of items online because of google's suggestions (GPU, cellphone, gas heater, etc). So I think it depends on how much data you feed it and how you feed it. As for suggested places to visit, I can't comment much since I don't use that feature.

Is that because you are using a "Google Apps" account? Apps has always lagged behind the "free" accounts in terms of functionality. Google Now works almost flawlessly for me with a Gmail account - appointment reminders, flight information, weather information, suggested places nearby, restaurant information, sports updates etc are generally always accurate.

Users who use Inbox instead of gmail should get a lot more rich inputs to Now. Appointments would be deduced from emails, for example, and Now will show you tracking information taken from orders in your receipts, and much more.

Now hasn't started reading email now. Somebody gleefully mentioned to me several months back that Now reminds her of bills (due dates and amounts) automatically. Essentially by reading emails from gmail. I was also told that by evening it'd start telling by itself the approximate time it would take to reach home.

For some such inputs are rich, for others scary.

A computer program does not "read" your email in a meaningfully "scary" way.

The information thus gathered can certainly be utilized in ways that may be "scary".

Most don't care anyways.

Any thoughts on what would have happened if Snowdens bosses could see his bills? His airline tickets? What the machine does with the bills is the scary bit.

For a third group, such inputs are rich if provided by an algorithm running locally, on your own personal data, whilst preserving your privacy.

They're scary when they're the carrot used to persuade you to allow a full invasion of your personal life by an outside entity, which as a matter of course requires permission to store, search, aggregate, and use commercially all of the data that it finds.

You don't need to be using Inbox for Google Now to have the appointment and tracking information parsed out. That's a setting in Google Now separate from the Inbox app. (I don't use Inbox but get those in Now)

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