Google Search Gets More Personal, Now Lets You Find Your Flight Info, Reservations, Photos And More
Google today announced a number of search features that make it easier for you to find your own personal information through Google Search. The search engine can now find information …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the third step in a long arc: Google made Personalized Search for everyone a default back in December 2009, then rebuilt flight search results in late 2011. What changes with this announcement is the source of the answers — instead of re-ranking the public web around a user, Search now retrieves the user's own data: flights, reservations, and photos pulled from Google's own services.
The timing is awkward for Google on privacy: the same week, the company confirmed a June motion to dismiss a class-action lawsuit alleging Gmail processing violates federal wiretap law. A feature whose value depends on scanning personal mail and photos lands squarely inside that legal fight.
First-order effects
- Signed-in Google users can now get their own flight status, reservations, and photos directly in Search results, making the search box a front end to personal accounts rather than just the web.
- The feature raises the stakes in the pending Gmail wiretap class action, since it extends machine processing of private messages into a visible product surface.
Second-order effects
- Travel suppliers and booking services whose confirmation emails live in Gmail risk being bypassed: if Google answers 'where is my flight' before the airline's site loads, the airline loses the page view and the upsell opportunity.
- Rival search engines face pressure to match account-linked results or concede the signed-in query, pushing the competitive battleground from link ranking toward who holds the most user data.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, search splits into two products — a public web index and a private personal index — forcing regulators and courts to decide whether scanning user content for retrieval counts as the kind of processing the wiretap statute reaches.
- Ownership of personal data becomes the moat: services like Gmail and Photos shift from communication tools to feedstock for search, entrenching any provider large enough to hold both the inbox and the index.
The trend: Search engines are evolving from indexing the public web to indexing each user's own data, with privacy litigation and regulation setting the boundaries of how far that retrieval can go.