Note that the emails that will be blended with your search results are from your inbox. This feature does not blend Alice's emails with Bob's search results, if Alice and Bob have not communicated.
Still, not cool. It is not uncommon for someone to use my machine for a brief stint. Say we're about to go somewhere and I ask them to print the directions. I'd rather not have emails from 5 years ago pop up in an innocuous search.
> in its latest attempt to deliver more personal responses more quickly
I liked it better when the web was impersonal, when you actually had to make an effort to filter out the information you didn't want. As more and more of the top of your search results get cluttered with things that Big Bro knows that you want, the less and less you are exposed to the world of things that you never knew you might take an interest in.
Search used to be a way to find marvelous new gems in the ocean of Internet. Now it's just a reaffirmation of your favorite repertoires, leaving you with the ultimate confirmation bias in everything you read, buy, and think about. These days, I can rarely find anything with Google that I didn't already know about, read about, write about, etc. Half the time, I use Google as a bookmark manager ... heck, I might as well just search my browser history. Throwing email history into the mix will only accelerate this trend, shoving each of us even deeper into our own little holes in the ground. Search has become boring, an incubator for egocentric brats, and a place where political diversity goes to die ... all in the name of personalization, i.e. ad revenue.
Nowadays, the only sites that dare to give me non-personalized information seem to be DuckDuckGo and Wikipedia. Oh, and occasionally Google, when I'm logged out and freshly rid of cookies.
> Nowadays, the only sites that dare to give me
> non-personalized information seem to be DuckDuckGo and
> Wikipedia. Oh, and occasionally Google, when I'm logged
> out and freshly rid of cookies.
I don't notice any significant difference in personalized vs non-personalized results, though personalized results are occasionally more useful.
If you really don't want Google to return personalized results, then click the "Hide personal results" icon in the top right. This is less annoying than having to clear all your cookies.
While I agree with you that accidental discovery is sometimes valuable, it seems like introducing you to things you weren't necessarily looking for was an unintended side effect of how the web originally worked. The goal was to help you find what you were looking for, but because it didn't always work completely, you sometimes ended up finding what you were not looking for.
What's interesting is that while Google is narrowing down on what you are specifically looking for in search, it is simultaneously introducing a product that is designed to suggest things you have not explicitly asked for: Google Now. It will be interesting to see if they can provide the discovery functionality that you want with a product that is specifically designed to perform that function, rather than one that does so unintentionally.
I can't understand the motivation for this. The opposite makes more sense. Where web results are shown with Gmail search. People often use search with other people looking over their shoulder .. how many times does one browse emails with a group of people around them?
Wait, what? The search function in gmail is terrible? What do you think they went out and built a new algorithm just for gmail instead of using their tried and tested one?
Speaking anecdotally of course, I've found the gmail search function to be very good. Add in operators as you would in regular searches and it's as useful as regular search--but in the context of email.
I think the current gmail search is a lot better than what it was a few months ago.
I still wish they did page numbers for search results or something like that. (I'm aware of the manually editing the url hack, but it's not the same experience.)
My searches are too personal now. I search for a snippet of code and all I get are iPhone or Minecraft related results. How do I turn off this personal-ization of my searches?
[+] [-] patrickmclaren|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sp332|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notregistering|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jebblue|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] harshadura|13 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] kijin|13 years ago|reply
I liked it better when the web was impersonal, when you actually had to make an effort to filter out the information you didn't want. As more and more of the top of your search results get cluttered with things that Big Bro knows that you want, the less and less you are exposed to the world of things that you never knew you might take an interest in.
Search used to be a way to find marvelous new gems in the ocean of Internet. Now it's just a reaffirmation of your favorite repertoires, leaving you with the ultimate confirmation bias in everything you read, buy, and think about. These days, I can rarely find anything with Google that I didn't already know about, read about, write about, etc. Half the time, I use Google as a bookmark manager ... heck, I might as well just search my browser history. Throwing email history into the mix will only accelerate this trend, shoving each of us even deeper into our own little holes in the ground. Search has become boring, an incubator for egocentric brats, and a place where political diversity goes to die ... all in the name of personalization, i.e. ad revenue.
Nowadays, the only sites that dare to give me non-personalized information seem to be DuckDuckGo and Wikipedia. Oh, and occasionally Google, when I'm logged out and freshly rid of cookies.
[+] [-] jmillikin|13 years ago|reply
If you really don't want Google to return personalized results, then click the "Hide personal results" icon in the top right. This is less annoying than having to clear all your cookies.
[+] [-] alwaysdoit|13 years ago|reply
What's interesting is that while Google is narrowing down on what you are specifically looking for in search, it is simultaneously introducing a product that is designed to suggest things you have not explicitly asked for: Google Now. It will be interesting to see if they can provide the discovery functionality that you want with a product that is specifically designed to perform that function, rather than one that does so unintentionally.
[+] [-] koglerjs|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wicknicks|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jfoutz|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] obituary_latte|13 years ago|reply
Speaking anecdotally of course, I've found the gmail search function to be very good. Add in operators as you would in regular searches and it's as useful as regular search--but in the context of email.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding?
[+] [-] neilkelty|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] powerslave12r|13 years ago|reply
I still wish they did page numbers for search results or something like that. (I'm aware of the manually editing the url hack, but it's not the same experience.)
[+] [-] twodayslate|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] powerslave12r|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yaroslavvb|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] lani|13 years ago|reply