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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

A big point of Google Now is it scrapes what you view in browser and uses that (web history) to determine what it should show you as cards.

I'm not sure why you'd expect local pages to be treated any differently in terms of extracting signals to feed into the model of what is of interest to you to be shown in Now.

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I don't know. Something about it just feels invasive. It probably doesn't help that the Now card was not useful at all to me. I noticed that they scraped my gmail for an OpenTable reservation confirmation a while back and notified me when it was time to leave. That also felt creepy, but I didn't mind as much because it was useful.

They do not "scrape" content on your local machine. They do incorporate stuff on their services including emails, as you mention (OpenTable, Amazon packages, etc).

You can also have this sort of stuff triggerd by desktop searches if you join this "field trial": https://www.google.com/experimental/gmailfieldtrial/

They don't scrape local pages, they analyse your search and browser history.

Been to Fedex to track a package? They'll note that and popup a card. Looked up a particular coffee shop on Google Maps? A card will popup with directions to said coffee shop.

I suppose I actually searched for all of those stock tickers while I was putting together the page. I was pretty sure I didn't, but it makes sense now because I had to get a decent approximation of the closing prices.

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