Gmail in personal search results | Hacker News Reader

Gmail in personal search results

google.com

69 pointsskbohra12362 comments

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.

See Matt_Cutts' response below:

> That's right. The matches from Gmail are collapsed unless you specifically indicate intent with search keywords like "gmail" or "email."

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.

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.

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?

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?

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).

Thing is, search is getting hard. I use Google+ and I'm glad that SPYW is enabled. The people I follow on Google+ (mainly tech figures, I use it like a more in-depth twitter) have things they talk about that I don't always hear, and things they +1 that I don't always see. When I search for something, modern SEO makes sure that I always see the results that advertisers want me to see, not necessarily results that are good. Google tries hard to overcome this, but it's always temporary.

By using SPYW, I see things my peers are using/liking. It's like a "Ask HN: What do you use for..." thread, but relevant to my immediate interest. Getting search more personal is the way Google is getting search to be more relevant. Google already knows your Gmail information. They already know what you're searching for at the moment. If the two overlap, what's the harm in giving me the option to see both at the same time?

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.

Search is basically becoming a modern version of Google Desktop.

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.

I've wanted this too. I have information in Gmail (Google Apps version), Google Reader, and Google Docs, plus information I've read randomly on the internet, and I often can't remember where I saw something. The more integration they can do, the better.

As a side note, this is something Spotlight should do on OS X, but it never quite got there, because Apple as usual seems to have lost interest in this OS feature after they used it as a selling point to launch one of them (Tiger? Leopard?). I don't use Mail, but ideally Apple would have developed and promoted Spotlight plugins to the point where you could have a 'live' Gmail plugin, a Google Reader plugin, a Google plugin, etc, but Apple seems more interested in a monolithic approach.

Point being if I could also search my text messages, iChat messages, and Word docs I'd be even happier. And imagine if the closed caption full text summaries of all the Hulu and Netflix you watched were searchable too.

I love your idea of a global spotlight, incorporating APIs from all the services I use. I wish there was a service that provided this, it would save me ton of time. I suffer from the "where did I see that?" syndrome all the time.

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.

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.

...or a different search engine

huh. I disagree;

Quite often I will search for an error message, or system problem, and google will come back with mailing list posts... that I posted. It's irritating on the level of the "please see your systems administrator" windows error messages. If I knew the answer, I wouldn't be searching.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The feature no doubt is helpful but is there a reason to not expose this feature via something like Google Desktop and to store the index locally?

> I remember reading something about X. Was it on Google+? Was it a blog post?

I would absolutely love it if they also included Reader feeds.

I may be outside of the normal use case here, and absolutely I am giving my opinion so judge it as one voice in 255 million (or whatever gmail's user count is now), but this isn't ever faster for me. I always have a gmail tab open.

As to remembering the source of a piece information, I made no claim to be perfect at this. What I will claim is that for the 95% of the time that I DO know the source of a piece of information I will be annoyed by results that are not from my intended search space.

Obviously Google has a pretty good track record at returning relevant results, but I can still hope for an off/on switch.

At the event, they demonstrated that the same one-click toggle to disable personalized results will also disable the results from Gmail. It's not in our enlightened self-interest to push information that's unhelpful or jarring, because then you're less likely to search on Google in the future.

"I always have a gmail tab open."

GMail search is painfully slow (for me average seems to be about 5+ seconds) and is not that powerful (i.e. can't match substrings, etc.). I'm personally looking forward to using Google search ranking on my email. I can see using this instead of GMail search to save time.

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.

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.

  > I don't want every random reddit video that I click on
  > to show up in my YouTube history

If you disable YouTube history, then you won't need to play weird games with your cookies.

The IP search is a great and super simple work around. Thanks a lot for that suggestions!

I simply use 2 different browsers. Firefox as main browser for what I would like to be tracked and Chrome incognito for visiting other websites. It's a pain but works fairly well.

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

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

I actually like being auto-logged into YouTube.

> the YouTube auto login

Simply disabling third party cookies seems to solve this (and many other) problem.

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.

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.

Personally, I use search all the time while I'm around other people or in a public place, and it would be a bit jarring to suddenly see private emails alongside my results at these times. This isn't a privacy issue per se, but it's just unexpected and I could see it leading to awkward situations for some people (e.g. when someone has someone else run a quick search for him and private or embarrassing emails show up).

If it's strictly opt-in then I don't see a problem.

It doesn't look like it shows the actual content of e-mails unless you search for something like "confirmation gmail". "confirmation" just gets you the "Messages from..." box which you have to click to open.

That's right. The matches from Gmail are collapsed unless you specifically indicate intent with search keywords like "gmail" or "email."

This is a disaster waiting to happen.

Non-tech users (probably 95% of Googles customers) have no idea how this happens. It's not immediately obvious to a non-tech person how your personal e-mails suddenly get blended into search results on another page. This will both freak people out and it will invade their privacy.

I really hope this will be opt-in.

This is something that you have to request at http://g.co/searchtrial , and I think we'll learn a lot from seeing how people interact with the feature and what feedback they provide.

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.

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...).

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

I guess - people have been seeing my previous search queries via chrome for years now. Isn't this what incognito windows are for?

Or anyone shoulder surfing (family, co-worker, etc) while you work on something together or look up movie times or anything will see contents of your gmail.

Just to reiterate: the box doesn't show any Gmail content by default. The default state of the box is collapsed. So we're only showing that you have matches in Gmail, and then you can choose whether to click and see the matches.

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.

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?

Free users are test subjects I suppose. It is way easier to test something out if you are not expected to provide support in case it blows up.

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

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.

You do know that the "free users" are actually the product that Google sells to advertisers? The more "free users" there are, the more money Google makes.

The more paid users there are, the more money Google makes. I'm not seeing your point. Unless a single free user is worth more than $50 yearly, paid users are worth more.

"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..)

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.

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

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

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)?

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

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