Google Widens Gmail Search Field Trial, Includes Google Drive In Search Results

Here’s another small step in Google’s effort to centralize your Google search activity: The company is expanding a field trial to include Google Drive documents in search results.

At the same time, the existing trial that includes Gmail information in search results is being expanded to work not only from Google.com, but also within Gmail itself.

Users who opt-in to the trial will be shown a prompt from Gmail and/or Google Drive in the right column of Google’s search results, as shown in this Google screenshot:

For privacy reasons, the actual results don’t show by default; the user has to click to see them.

And in Gmail, the integrated search results now show up during a search, like this:

Google announced the original Gmail results trial in August and, at that point, it only showed information from Gmail emails in Google.com search results. See our article, Up Close: Gmail In Google Search Results Field Trial, for more about how that aspect works.

Interested Google users can join the field trial. It’s only for English-language Gmail users and is still not open to Google Apps customers.