What do you think about Gmail being included in Google search results?
In another sign that Google is trying to make all of its services/products interconnected, they are apparently planning to tie in your Gmail account to search results. The example that I've seen used is that if you were to search for "Amazon" in search, it would pull information from your emails and show it with the search results. I'm not sure how I feel about this. To be honest, the first thing that came to mind was what if a current girlfriend did a search and it popped up info pulled from email exchangers with former girlfriends? Am I being paranoid? What do people think about this? Sometimes it seems that just when I get used to one privacy issue, another one crops up. Although, come to think of it, this add some context to the dust up over Google's privacy policy changes to allow sharing of information between different Google divisions. I guess this sort of integration is what they had in mind at the time.
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I dislike it, and I hope users get an option to turn it off. Email and web searching do not necessarily belong together. If I wanted to search my email, I would do so. I don't want email results cluttering up my search results.
Sometimes integration goes too far, and I think this is one of those times. A huge thumbs down to Google on this.
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First of all: hiding stuff from the current girlfriend about a past girlfriend? Never a good idea.
Second: Surely if you sign out of the Gmail account, your account info will no longer be included in the search results, right? So sign out of your account. IF you don't want the current girlfriend poking around your email, that is the best solution anyway.
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It only works if you are logged in, so I guess you don't log in to Google if you don't want the two integrated. Although, now that I think about it, if you use Talk, Voice, Calendar, etc. then you pretty much have to be logged in all the time. I'm logged into Google right now, in fact, sitting at my desk at work. While I'm not too worried about girlfriends, here at my office it isn't uncommon to do a quick search on the nearest computer, and I don't really want information from my Gmail popping up when someone uses my computer to google something.
So, yeah, I'm with jimlynch on this; I hope that it is an opt-in thing.