Google will be bridging its search engine and its Gmail service to allow users the chance to access personal queries quicker.
This feature was introduced on Wednesday and will allow Google search engines to mine for information in the user's Gmail account and attach the data to the search request. The results will be shown to the right of the main results or on the top of the search page.
Google's business has been threatened by companies like Facebook, which have made it easier to share information online. Google has been adapting to build personal services and integrate them in the search engine.
"Sometimes the best answer to your question isn't available on the public Web -- it may be contained elsewhere, such as in your email," Amit Singhal, Google search senior vice president told reporters. "We think you shouldn't have to be your own mini search engine to find the most useful information; it should just work."
There might be privacy issues when email information blends with Google search results. But Google will show the Gmail results in a collapsed format, where the users must open to view the details. As of now, users have to sign up to participate in the trial run.
"We're developing a way to find this information for you that's useful and unobtrusive... These are baby steps, but important ones on our way to building the search engine of the future," Singhal said.
The service is limited and is available in English only. Google said it was willing to let information from other mail services be displayed in Google results. Microsoft announced it has no plans to make information from its mail service available in Google search, Yahoo did not comment.
Singhal said Google will be using the feedback from this service to build search engines for future. The company will look beyond the query words and look at what exactly people are searching. They have built the "Knowledge Graph" technology that will "understand real things in the world", according to Ben Gomes of Google. This technology will be extended to all English speaking countries from Wednesday. Google intends to lure more queries into the engine. Every month it processes more than 100 billion requests.
The Algorithm to mine information from databases has been refined giving context to words and then uses general search patterns, added Gomes. Knowledge Graph is programmed in such a way so as to recognize more than 500 million people, places, or things using about 3.5 billion attributes and associations between bits of information.
Gmail when it first started in 2004 provided 1 GB of storage but now for long-time users it provides 10 GB of space. The company is constantly striving to reinvent itself and defend its dominance as world's favorite search engine.
