Google Search field trial adds Gmail contact info to your search results, promises Google+ profile support soon
If you've already signed up to Google's experimental field trials, you might have started to notice people you know appearing within search queries.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google had already been broadening personal search through a combined view of Gmail, Calendar, Drive and other Google data, while a 2012 experiment used Gmail to surface purchases, reservations and events in Search. The new field trial applies that approach to people in a user's address book.
Google also expanded Gmail's own retrieval scope in May 2013 with Drive files and Calendar events searchable from Gmail. Bringing contact information into Search makes Google Search a more central interface for data that had previously stayed within individual services.
First-order effects
- Participants in Google's field trials can receive people-related results drawn from Gmail contact information, reducing the need to open Gmail to identify a known contact.
- Planned Google+ profile support gives Google a route to attach its social-profile layer to these Gmail-derived people results.
Second-order effects
- Gmail becomes more valuable to Google Search as a source of personal context, reinforcing Google's incentive to connect sign-in-based services rather than keep their search experiences separate.
- Google+ gains a potential discovery surface in routine search queries, where its profiles can compete for attention with the contact details users already hold in Gmail.
Third-order effects
- If Google keeps extending personal results across its services, Search is likely to become a cross-product interface organized around a signed-in user's data and identity, rather than a standalone web index.
- That model raises the strategic importance of controlling both a consumer identity layer and the underlying mail, calendar and file data used to personalize results.
The trend: Google is turning Search into a personalized access layer for information spread across its signed-in services.