Better (but fewer) ads for Gmail

Google is working on a system that will make the adverts its Gmail users see a bit more relevant.

The new system will apply Gmail's importance ranking to ads to offer fewer irrelevant ads and even offers and coupons for your local area.

"Bad ads tend to annoy people." said Google. "We're trying to cut down on these ads, and make the ones you do see much more useful."

Following on from features like Priority Inbox, which aims to sort through the unimportant emails, Google will try a similar approach to ads.

By using some of the same signals that help predict which messages are likely to be important to you, Gmail aims to better predict which ads may be useful to you.

"For example, if you've recently received a lot of messages about photography or cameras, a deal from a local camera store might be interesting. On the other hand if you've reported these messages as spam, you probably don't want to see that deal," explained Google.

The changes will be rolled out slowly to begin with and might take a while before they reach New Zealand.

While you wait for that iPad 2 deal to spring up in your inbox, here's a video further explaining the changes.