The first category involved Gmail integration. With your permission, Google will keep an eye on your inbox and recognize flight confirmations, hotel reservations, restaurant bookings, event tickets, and package tracking emails. It will take that knowledge and give you a relevant card when appropriate — say, giving you your hotel information when you land in the right city or letting you know when it's time to leave for a concert.

The new features are part of Google’s growing efforts to provide relevant results based on the knowledge it’s accumulated about you. As search gets better, so do people’s expectations for what it provides. “Of course Google’s going to access more than just the public information on the web,” Scott Huffman, Engineering Director for Search Quality at Google tells us, “Google’s going to know when my flight is, whether my package has gotten here yet and where my wife is and how long it’s going to take her to get home this afternoon. [...] Of course, Google knows that stuff.” If you’re willing to opt in to letting Google know so much about you — and increasingly, opting in is the default — then Google wants to return the favor by using that information to your benefit. It requires you to trust Google quite a bit, but the company hopes that your trust will be rewarded.

"Google’s going to know when my flight is, whether my package has gotten here yet and where my wife is."

These new cards are actually similar to a feature that Google added to its web search results this past August, both in content and in style. That's probably not an accident — if you assume Google has already won the battle for search, the next battle is giving you information before you even search for it. When it comes to deciding which data to give you, Barra tells us that Google has "a pipeline [...], possibly in the hundreds of cards” from its many engineering teams. Rather than flood users with all of those new cards, Google is taking a slow and steady approach to adding those new features — if only because right now it can only add those cards with a software update.

Some of the other new categories of cards are relatively minor additions: stocks, news, local concerts, movies, and local attractions. It also has a basic exercise tracking card that utilizes the phone’s accelerometer and location data: every month it will let you know how far you've walked or biked and also tell you how it compared to the month previous. Another new card lets you know that you're near a "photo opportunity," as Product Management Director Baris Gultekin told us. It uses data from Google's Panaramio service, noting when you're close to a place that has a "high density of pictures taken at a spot." You can see photos that were taken at the landmark and, Google hopes, take one yourself.