Today during a press discussion at Google I/O, Matthew Glotzbach, Google’s Director of Product, Enterprise, strongly hinted that Google Apps would soon be getting a key new feature: unified search across all of a user’s Google Apps. In other words, there’s a good chance that we’ll soon be able to enter a search query into, say, Gmail, and see not just matches from Gmail, but also results in Google Calendar, Docs, and Wave as well.
The topic was brought up by a reporter during the event, who asked if a unified search feature was in the works. Glotzbach coyly responded that “he couldn’t agree with [him] more” about the benefits of such a feature, but that “he had nothing to announce on that front.” He then reiterated that he thought it was a great idea, and hinted that we’d probably see a “unified search layer” first across Google’s own Apps, and that eventually it would be worked into other applications available through the Google Apps Marketplace.
This would be great news to the millions of consumers and businesses on Google Apps. Under the current system, if you want to search through Google Apps for a certain document, event, or email, you need to open up the corresponding App. It’s hardly a deal-breaker, but those lost seconds and extra mouse clicks add up.
Obviously there isn’t a timeframe for when this will launch yet, but it sounded like this is well beyond the initial planning stages.
Google Apps (formerly known as Google Apps for your domain), is a web-based office suite offering email, document creation, and collaboration functionality. Google Apps provides Google products hosted under an organization’s custom domain name.
Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of online tools and platforms including: Gmail, Maps, YouTube, and Google+, the company’s extension into the social space. Most of its Web-based products are free, funded by Google’s highly integrated online advertising platforms AdWords and AdSense. Google promotes the idea that advertising should be highly targeted and relevant to users thus providing...
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