A few days ago, the COS of Google, Antone Gonsalves said that the security risk of Gmail’s new personal search results was not relevant for large businesses even though it crawled through the inbox to provide relevant search results.
What Google began on Thursday was the talk of the town with many apprehensive about its security risks. The Google’s personalized search result feature started operations with a total of 425 million accounts out of which only 1 million were signed up on the opening day. Those who took this account got personalized search results on the right side of the basic Gmail page along with the conventional search results on the center page.
Gmail With Google Search – Is It A Security Risk?
The personalized results would also incorporate information from the inbox such as typing in a word that is repeated in mails, will show it on top of the personalized search results. Google justifies this by adding that people tend to forget information collected through email, and this personalized method of searching simply siphons through old emails, showing relevant data that a user may have otherwise overlooked.
Security analysts did not see the potential issues with this personalized search page, simply because people objected to the intrusive method used in the process. Yes, it is creepily invasive, but it’s not a big security issue said Dan Olds from Gabriel Consulting Group. However, a major issue with this form of search is that the search algorithm may not remove advertising messages, and might just show these instead of actual relevant data. Whether this shall happen or if it is riddled with security risks will only come out with time. For now, all such information is speculative at best.
Google for long has been the innovator in search engine algorithms, and this is just another method to bring a higher level of user interaction with the search data.
