Google just announced that users who participate in its Gmail and Google.com search field trial will now also see results from their personal calendar on Google’s search results pages. You can see these results by using queries like [what is on my calendar today] and [when am i meeting rip].
The field trial itself isn’t actually new, by the way. Google has been running it for quite a while now and it’s open for anybody who is interested in trying out some of these personalized search features.
Recently, Google also added information about your upcoming flights, restaurant and hotel reservations and scheduled events to this trial. To display these results, Google scans your Gmail inbox for relevant emails from OpenTable, Ticketmaster, Eventbrite and others. Some of this information, of course, is also used to power Google Now.
As Google’s senior vice president for Google Search Amit Singhal noted when the company first introduced this field trial, “sometimes the best answer to your question isn’t available on the public web—it may be contained somewhere else, such as in your email.”
The reason Google will likely continue to offer these features as an opt-in “field trial” for the time being is that it obviously needs to connect your search results, Gmail inbox and calendar to display these results on Google.com. Not everybody will be comfortable with the idea of Google scanning and using information from their inboxes and calendars, after all.
As with all the previous additions to the field trial, it’s only available in English and for U.S.-based users with a gmail.com address. Sadly, this also means that calendar results from your Google Apps work account won’t appear on Google Search anytime soon.
