The problem with this is their false matches. For example I looked up cffi (C foreign function interface) library. They decided to add a stock ticker of the same letters despite me never clicking on any stock links.
Any lookups of other things give the same results, such as looking up news stories (eg a plane crash starts tracking flights of the same number) or how many calories there are in a McDonalds burger (starts showing nearest locations). I don't remember the example now but I've had it decide other searches are really for sports teams. (Annoyingly they also don't consider Formula 1 a sport.)
The biggest problem is the functionality is non-deterministic. You can't be sure if a card will appear for flights (eg you look one up you expect to meet tomorrow), and you get unintended junk at other times.
The reason is that Google are taking a superficial approach, almost just doing string matching. They aren't going deeper and figuring out more context (eg did I mean a stock, which day do I care about for a flight, is there any chance I'm looking for a McDonalds versus looking at corporate financials).
Perhaps they're taking a lean approach. Before they build the clever stuff, they may want to see if people will use it even with the dumb string matching.
> You can't be sure if a card will appear for flights
In my experience, Google Now finds my flights in my Gmail 100% of the time. For at least a dozen flights across the US. And for some airports (SFO is one, unsurprisingly) it even has the terminal and gate information ready! Google Now makes the "arriving at the airport" experience better every time for me.
I had some friends arriving at SFO from Dubai a few weeks later, but had no way of telling if Now would show the right flight on the right day since there is no card about future flights. Similar story for the cross country flight they took a few days later.
In order for me to depend on Now, I need to know I can trust it and it only got one of the flights right. There is no way to know if it will do the right thing in the future unless you keep checking and having a backup plan.
That's because it's Google Now, not Google Planner. It's for giving you information relevant to right now. You don't plan to use Google Now for something, you check it when you want information relevant to you at the moment. If you stop trying to make Google Now into a personal organizer, you'll enjoy using it more.
> It's for giving you information relevant to right now
More accurately it is giving you a random subset of information that might be relevant right now. The behaviour is not deterministic so you can't rely on it.
I was operating under the (apparently mistaken) impression that the only automated processing of email contents done by teh Google was for targeted advertising purposes.
It's sort of scary to think that they're now going to parse out and generate non-email records of potentially confidential information such as your physical location at a point in time (like a flight number + date).
I steal private data for a living and that's just fucking creepy.
Any lookups of other things give the same results, such as looking up news stories (eg a plane crash starts tracking flights of the same number) or how many calories there are in a McDonalds burger (starts showing nearest locations). I don't remember the example now but I've had it decide other searches are really for sports teams. (Annoyingly they also don't consider Formula 1 a sport.)
The biggest problem is the functionality is non-deterministic. You can't be sure if a card will appear for flights (eg you look one up you expect to meet tomorrow), and you get unintended junk at other times.
The reason is that Google are taking a superficial approach, almost just doing string matching. They aren't going deeper and figuring out more context (eg did I mean a stock, which day do I care about for a flight, is there any chance I'm looking for a McDonalds versus looking at corporate financials).