Google Launches New Experimental Search Features For Tracking Your Online Purchases, Reservations & Events From Gmail
Google has long been running a number of experimental Search and Gmail field trials anybody can sign up for and today it's launching a few nifty new search features …
Context & Ripple Effects
This trial extends the personal-search field trial Google opened in October, which began folding Gmail, Calendar and Drive content into results; the new experiments push further into transactional territory by parsing purchases, reservations and events out of users' inboxes. It lands amid a busy December for Google — an iOS Maps app, eighteen new Google+ features, and a round of service shutdowns it branded 'winter cleaning.'
The commerce angle is sensitive timing: Google's shopping chief Sameer Samat publicly denied on December 20 that the company plans to become a retailer, even as its Shopping page draws comparisons to one. Separately, Google has been urging site owners to add structured data for rich snippets — this trial shows why publishers comply: machine-readable data is what lets Search answer questions directly instead of listing links.
First-order effects
- Field-trial participants can now find their own orders, bookings and event details by typing a query into Google Search rather than digging through Gmail, making the inbox a queryable index.
- Merchants' confirmation emails become raw material for Google's results, raising the stakes of the structured-data push Google has been running with webmasters since early December.
Second-order effects
- Rival search engines face pressure to match inbox-level personalization or cede 'where is my order' queries — high-frequency, high-intent searches — to Google.
- The closer Search sits to purchase data, the more Google's shopping ambitions invite scrutiny: Samat's denial that Google is becoming a retailer will be tested against features that track what users buy.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, search shifts from ranking the public web toward answering from personal data — a structural change that puts email providers in competition with search engines and guarantees privacy and data-use debates over how much of an inbox a search box may read.
- Publishers and merchants become dependent on feeding structured data to Google to stay visible, concentrating intermediation of commercial intent in one company's index.
The trend: Search engines are converting personal inboxes into structured, queryable databases, turning web search into a personal-assistant product one field trial at a time.