The company aiming to unleash a feature that will allow users to pull in relevant Gmail conversations whenever doing a Google search. However, not everyone will get these results right away as it is only being offered as an exclusive “field trial.”
“Sometimes the best response to your question is not available on the public Web — it may be contained elsewhere, such as in your email,” Google search senior vice president Amit Singhal said in a blog post on Wednesday.
“We think you should not have to be your own mini search engine to find the most useful information; it should just work.”
Google is inviting people to visit google.com/experimental/gmailfieldtrial to sign up to take part in the new feature, which was still taking shape.
“We are just devising a way to find this information for you that is useful and unobtrusive, and we would love your feedback,” Singhal said.
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The trial was limited to English language searches and messages in Gmail accounts. Users can request to be in the field trial on Google’s website, although participation is not guaranteed. This modification is almost a natural extension for Google. “Gmail is almost larger than our web corpus and it continues to grow.” says Kamdar. The change is part of Google’s on-going mission to build the search engine of the future.
Well, blending email information into search results could surely cause privacy concerns but Google says by showing the Gmail findings in a collapsed form, users must actively open the results after they have signed up for the service.
We are not quite certain where Google is going with this feature, and all indications suggest they are not 100% sure either, but that is why it is little more than an experimental field trial for the time being.
In fact, you can sign up for the trial, but Google is not giving any assurance that everyone will be able to get in. However, you will need to be using Google.com in English, and you would not be able to sign up for it using a Google Apps account (meaning your email address has to end in @gmail.com in order for you to be eligible).