Over the next several days there will be a significant expansion to the Google Now functionality. A Google blog post announced that by drawing on information contained within your social network accounts, email accounts and Google Calendar, they will be able to directly answer questions such as, “What’s my flight status?” or “When will my package arrive?” Typing these types of queries into the normal Google search page will return results about your specific flights, packages or reservations.
While this will certainly upset many people who are concerned with the invasion of privacy, it will also be quite convenient for many. Google has long been ‘reading’ all of your email, Google+ information and other items on all the Google properties, so the privacy issues are not new problems. Google, it seems, is not worried about the privacy concerns of some of their customers, and has made the calculated decision to move forward with offering services based on the information they gather from these practices.
These updates will also impact marketers in a variety of ways. The most obvious will be the fact that rather than displaying organic search results for these types of queries, they will be returning the information gathered. This only expands on the fact that Google is displaying fewer and fewer actual organic results in favor of advertisements, sites owned by Google and now this. For marketers in the travel, shipping or similar niches, this could bite into their traffic, though hopefully not by too much.
This new feature will be available on searches made from all devices including PCs, tablets and mobile phones. The hope of Google is that this will be one more step in turning the mobile phone or other device into a more effective ‘personal assistant’ to add convenience to those who use them. Whether or not this will catch on has yet to be seen.
You can see the official Google blog post HERE.
