Google is expanding the search integration filed trial

Oct 16, 2012 08:30 GMT  ·  By

Google is further expanding its search options and further integrating more of its services into the main search page. A few months back, Google started adding Gmail results to Google search, for those that wanted them.

Now it's making the next logical step and is adding Google Drive files to the results as well.

Google Calendar and contacts are also added to the mix, making Google Search a much more personal and integrated service. It goes the other way around too, you'll find your Google Drive files in Gmail as well.

"You can sign up for a new and expanded field trial that makes it easier to find your stuff across Google, whether you’re searching on Google.com or searching in Gmail," Google explained.

"In Gmail, as you begin to type into the search box, you'll instantly start seeing relevant emails from Gmail as well as results from Google Drive, Google Calendar, and more," it added.

All of this is optional for obvious, if not completely rational, reasons. Users that want to expand their search options have to sign up to the "field trial" to enable the new features. The same goes for the Gmail integration Google introduced earlier.

"When you search on Google.com, your results will include relevant information and messages from Gmail (something familiar to those who joined the original field trial) and now -- new in this field trial -- also files, documents, spreadsheets and more from Google Drive," Google further explained.

Having personal results added to what people perceive as a public search engine is tricky. Search results in Google are associated with the web, so seeing Gmail results there makes it seem like those emails are somehow visible to everyone.

That's not true of course and it doesn't make any sense to anyone that has an idea of how Google and the web works, but that's not most people.

Google has enough issues with "privacy" or at least the perception of privacy as it is. In fact, integrating products into search like this is only made possible by the privacy policy changes made earlier this year, the same policy changes that EU regulators want reversed, "because privacy."

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