Mountain View, California — Following numerous updates recently to Gmail that included automatic translation, quick access to contacts in search and the new Google+ integration, the search engine leader has today announced that it will be launching a fresh update that now includes customize autocomplete predictions when searching from within your Gmail inbox.
Admittedly, Google pretty brilliantly utilizes the contents of your inbox to deliver personalized advertising while you view it on the web. At least this feature is using that data to improve your Gmail experience.
These autocomplete suggestions should be a bit more useful to users who would be thrilled to know that Google is bringing the same search experience in Google to its email service.
“Today, we are expanding that experience even better by improving the autocomplete suggestions you see when you search in Gmail,” Google said.
“For instance, 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,” Google explained.
In fact, the Gmail ads are a result of an automated system that reads the subject and contents of your email inbox and then delivers ads based on those topics. Google stresses that no humans read the data, and the system used to tailor your autocomplete suggestions is likely the same. Anyways, it is certain that some will not like the additional use of what is considered private data, but at the same time, it is already being used for advertising and other purposes. This use of private data should at least improve the user’s experience.
The new functionality will be gradually rolled out first to Gmail users supporting English over the next few days. Google promises that more languages will be supported in the next coming months. Google also mentioned that the new feature will not be available to Google Apps users, although the company plans to bring the feature to Apps domains in the future.