Accord­ing to reports, Google recent­ly exper­i­ment­ed with allow­ing users to fil­ter search­es by per­son­al results like infor­ma­tion that could be pulled from a Gmail account if said user was logged in while search­ing. And then, just like that, the fea­ture dis­ap­peared.

A Google spokesper­son said, “We are always exper­i­ment­ing with ways to make Google search more use­ful for our users. At this time, we have no fur­ther plans to announce.”

For its part, Search Engine Land likened the fea­ture to Google’s Search Plus Your World, which sur­faced in 2012 and “has come out from time to time since then.”

Per­son­al­iza­tion has long been part of the over­all Google search expe­ri­ence, which taps into data like loca­tion and search his­to­ry to deliv­er the most rel­e­vant results for each user. But as Google faces strong com­pe­ti­tion from oth­er plat­forms in voice and visu­al search, it has a vest­ed inter­est in fur­ther­ing its mis­sion of ensur­ing the best pos­si­ble user expe­ri­ence. And a Per­son­al-tab-like fea­ture may be a key to doing just that – and it could breathe new life into the email mar­ket­ing indus­try at the same time.

Even more personal

Indeed, Peter Oles­son, founder of SEO ser­vice provider SEO Vena­tor, said a Per­son­al tab extends Google’s efforts, mak­ing the search expe­ri­ence even more per­son­al, accu­rate and con­ve­nient com­pared to oth­er search engines.

Ahmed Khal­i­fa, direc­tor of Word­Press con­sul­tan­cy and train­ing firm Ignite­Rock, agreed it’s anoth­er way for Google to per­son­al­ize a user’s search expe­ri­ence.

“There are a cou­ple of exam­ples that this could be used for. If you have recent­ly ordered a new Playsta­tion 4 and want to know your order details, you can search for ‘Playsta­tion 4’ or ‘PS4’ on Google, switch to the Per­son­al tab [and] you will be able to see results which will list your order details, pre­sum­ably from your con­nect­ed Gmail account,” Khal­i­fa said. “[Or] if you have pur­chased a [trip] to New York and [are] look­ing for your itin­er­ary, your Per­son­al tab will list the emails that men­tion New York and you will find your itin­er­ary with­in Google.”

Oles­son sur­mised Per­son­al tab results could also include infor­ma­tion about, say, recipes due to recent search behav­ior.

How­ev­er, Bob Clary, direc­tor of mar­ket­ing at soft­ware train­ing com­pa­ny Devel­op­In­tel­li­gence, said he thinks a Per­son­al tab is less about search result per­son­al­iza­tion and more about “Google attempt­ing to be the hub for all your activ­i­ty,” adding, “For a while now, Google has been pulling bits from Gmail into your search results like your flight infor­ma­tion, and this seems to be an expan­sion on that.”

And David Erick­son, vice pres­i­dent of pub­lic rela­tions at PR firm Kar­wos­ki & Courage, said it’s pos­si­ble this func­tion­al­i­ty could extend beyond Gmail and Google Pho­tos to include YouTube and Google Docs as well.

Ryan Raplee, CEO of Legal InSites, a dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing firm focused on lawyers and law firms, agreed Google Dri­ve search­ing is like­ly “well under­way in devel­op­ment.”

Email marketers, rejoice (potentially)

Not sur­pris­ing­ly, a fea­ture that pulls direct­ly from email has the most poten­tial impact for email mar­keters.

“Right now, email mar­ket­ing spe­cial­ists don’t have a lot of oppor­tu­ni­ties to be heаrd and seen — [you’re] just send­ing let­ters and they may get lost in your cus­tomers’ inbox­es,” said Yulia Khans­vyaro­va, head of dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing at dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing soft­ware firm SEM­rush. “Even if a cus­tomer is still inter­est­ed in your pro­pos­al, he or she is spammed by great amount of irrel­e­vant emails and can…lose [an] impor­tant one. [If a Per­son­al tab is imple­ment­ed], as far as I under­stand, cus­tomers who look, for exam­ple, for [a] new dress will be able to find rel­e­vant [emails] from…online stores.”

Erick­son agreed a Per­son­al tab makes it much more con­ve­nient to find email con­tent.

“While Gmail has sophis­ti­cat­ed native search capa­bil­i­ties, I imag­ine most peo­ple do not take advan­tage of them. Help­ing peo­ple find their own emails through a search inter­face with which they are already very famil­iar will like­ly increase the fre­quen­cy with which peo­ple search their [inbox­es],” Erick­son added. “I per­son­al­ly sub­scribe to a lot of newslet­ters and I often email myself arti­cles and web­sites so I can find them lat­er. For peo­ple who use their inbox as I do, adding the Per­son­al tab makes it much eas­i­er and more con­ve­nient for me to retrieve that con­tent when I need it.”

As a result, Khal­i­fa said mar­keters have yet anoth­er rea­son to make sure their emails and newslet­ters are read­able and con­tain schema.org, a markup vocab­u­lary that can be embed­ded into email mar­ket­ing and pro­vides data to help improve user engage­ment via Google.

“This will make sure that the infor­ma­tion is more avail­able to Google and this will add to the consumer’s Google expe­ri­ence,” Khal­i­fa added.

Indeed, Erick­son said if the fre­quen­cy of users search­ing their inbox­es increas­es, the Per­son­al tab will like­ly cre­ate more engage­ment with email newslet­ters as users find this con­tent more fre­quent­ly.

“Email mar­keters should now think like search engine opti­miz­ers by con­sid­er­ing what are the like­ly queries some­one might use in the Per­son­al tab in rela­tion to their con­tent,” he added.

Better ads, too

In addi­tion, Erick­son said a Per­son­al tab means search adver­tis­ing based on email inbox search­es has the poten­tial to get much bet­ter.

“The ads in Gmail are tiny com­pared to the much greater screen real estate and more pow­er­ful fea­tures of Google AdWords ads that you [could the­o­ret­i­cal­ly] place in the Per­son­al tab,” he said.

Raplee agreed mar­keters would have a new way to get high­ly tar­get­ed ads in front of users with intent.

And Oles­son said he sees poten­tial in Google using this infor­ma­tion for future retar­get­ing pur­pos­es as well.

Ryan Kh, CEO of Smart­Da­ta Col­lec­tive, which calls itself “an edi­to­ri­al­ly inde­pen­dent, mod­er­at­ed com­mu­ni­ty pro­vid­ing enter­prise lead­ers access to the lat­est trends in busi­ness intel­li­gence and data man­age­ment,” too, said he expects Google will allow mar­keters to use this data to tar­get cus­tomers by gen­der, age and oth­er demo­graph­ic vari­ables.

“These options are already avail­able, but they haven’t been very accu­rate,” he said. “They will be much more accu­rate if it can con­nect with Google accounts to learn more about the users. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, this is some­thing Google has yet to con­firm.”

In addi­tion, Kh said he thinks Google will start to make edu­cat­ed deci­sions about user inter­ests and oth­er behav­ior, but he not­ed “the accu­ra­cy of those options may leave a lot to be desired for the first cou­ple of years.”

Not every­one is so opti­mistic about a poten­tial Per­son­al tab.

“If it works, it could rep­re­sent a fun­da­men­tal change in the way that peo­ple use Google,” Clary said. “My pre­dic­tion, how­ev­er, is that peo­ple won’t accept the func­tion­al­i­ty and it’ll even­tu­al­ly go away.”