p.s. This is one widget where allowing it to use the maximum space possible makes a lot of sense, especially when traveling internationally (traffic, places, weather, currency, timezone, social/birthdays, calendar events, "things nearby".
p.s. This is one widget where allowing it to use the maximum space possible makes a lot of sense, especially when traveling internationally (traffic, places, weather, currency, timezone, social/birthdays, calendar events, "things nearby".
Any lookups of other things give the same results, such as looking up news stories (eg a plane crash starts tracking flights of the same number) or how many calories there are in a McDonalds burger (starts showing nearest locations). I don't remember the example now but I've had it decide other searches are really for sports teams. (Annoyingly they also don't consider Formula 1 a sport.)
The biggest problem is the functionality is non-deterministic. You can't be sure if a card will appear for flights (eg you look one up you expect to meet tomorrow), and you get unintended junk at other times.
The reason is that Google are taking a superficial approach, almost just doing string matching. They aren't going deeper and figuring out more context (eg did I mean a stock, which day do I care about for a flight, is there any chance I'm looking for a McDonalds versus looking at corporate financials).
In my experience, Google Now finds my flights in my Gmail 100% of the time. For at least a dozen flights across the US. And for some airports (SFO is one, unsurprisingly) it even has the terminal and gate information ready! Google Now makes the "arriving at the airport" experience better every time for me.
In order for me to depend on Now, I need to know I can trust it and it only got one of the flights right. There is no way to know if it will do the right thing in the future unless you keep checking and having a backup plan.
More accurately it is giving you a random subset of information that might be relevant right now. The behaviour is not deterministic so you can't rely on it.
It's sort of scary to think that they're now going to parse out and generate non-email records of potentially confidential information such as your physical location at a point in time (like a flight number + date).
I steal private data for a living and that's just fucking creepy.
What I found though were starred places. I like the ability to be able to see my search history. How can you get to that from the navigation app ?
Maybe I spend too much time searching Maps randomly.
A browser plugin to enable/disable Now tracking seems like it could be handy, however. Though then if you forget to turn it back on you lose what eitally mentioned: "I forgot X, oh, thankfully Now caught it".
But doesn't Google Maps have a history feature that syncs across devices? Now seems like it might be polluting that space.
I've gotten into the habit of using incognito mode for most searches, and only staying logged in for things I think I'll want Now-based information for, like directions or information cards.
[1]Sth like Bluetooth Low Energy (it requires additional h/w though)