Google Adds Personal Gmail Results Into Search
In a major move to integrate personal search and Web search, Google is adding some users' Gmail into their search results as a “limited field trial,” it said today. — So when participating users search for “Amazon,” information …
Context & Ripple Effects
Google made personalized search the default in 2009; this limited Gmail trial extends that approach from ranking public web results around a user to retrieving from a user’s private mailbox. The change gives Google a test of whether one search interface can serve both information domains.
First-order effects
- Participating Gmail users can surface relevant messages alongside public results, while Google must separate each user’s private mailbox matches from the shared web index.
- Google’s search product becomes more useful for queries such as Amazon that may have both public information and personal correspondence attached to them.
Second-order effects
- Users who adopt the trial have less reason to switch between Gmail and Google Search for information-finding, concentrating more of that activity in Google’s search interface.
- Google’s product teams gain a reason to make private-data retrieval a core search capability rather than a separate mail feature, provided the limited trial produces usable results.
Third-order effects
- If private-source retrieval expands beyond this trial, search competition shifts from finding the best public pages toward assembling the most useful answer from data a platform already holds about the user.
- The move points to a more deeply personalized search model, in which the boundary between a web query and a query of a user’s own information becomes less distinct.
The trend: Search is evolving from personalized ranking of public results toward unified retrieval across the web and a user’s private Google data.