This obvious search feature has taken a long time to implement

May 22, 2012 09:20 GMT  ·  By

Google's core aptitude is search and, even as it tries to reinvent itself as a polyvalent company, search still is what it does best. And from time to time it remembers that. It has now improved the autocomplete system in Gmail search with customized data.

The autocomplete feature, same as the Google Search one, provides query suggestions based on what you've typed so far. Those suggestions are based on what everyone else is searching for.

The system used to work the same in Gmail, so everyone got the same suggestions for the same words, but that is changing now.

"Now when you type something into the Gmail search box, the autocomplete predictions will be tailored to the content in your email, so you can save time and get the information you want faster than ever before," Google's Isaac Elias, a software engineer, wrote.

"For example, you might now get 'lax reservation' or 'lax united' as predictions after typing 'lax' if you have received an email with a flight confirmation for your trip to Los Angeles in your inbox recently," he explained.

The changes make a lot of sense, if you're searching for something in Gmail, more often than not, it's going to be something personal. One user's Gmail inbox may be vastly different from another's, something that doesn't happen with web search.

If anything, it's surprising that Gmail took this long to roll out this obvious feature. English language users will be seeing the new feature in Gmail in the next few days and it will be implemented for localized versions of the site in the coming months.

One reason why Google is only now doing this may be its previous privacy policies that didn't allow different products to share data so easily. Though it's unlikely as Google could have simply ported the autocomplete system from search to be used solely in Gmail.