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Comment by Iaks | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 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.

"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.

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 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.

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