Google has released a new Gmail Lab that adds a search box for regular Google Search within Gmail. When you turn on the lab (simply called Google Search) , you’ll get a search box on the left side of your inbox that looks like this:
You may be thinking to yourself that Gmail already has a search box to search the web via Google’ search engine, and you would be right. It looks like this:
With that search box, your results will open in a separate window however, while with this new lab, your results will show up in a small chat-like window at the bottom of your screen within Gmail. This way you don’t have to leave your inbox, which could be convenient considering that you’re probably not done with Gmail if you are searching from there to begin with.
When you click on a result, it will still open in another window (or tab), so this may or may not be useful depending on what you’re looking for. But the results within the small window that’s in Gmail do provide drop down menus when you mouse over them that come equipped with the following features:
– If you’re reading a message, you can start a reply to the message with the search result as the first thing in your reply.
– If you’re writing a message, you can paste the result, or just the URL into your message.
– If you’re chatting with someone, you can send the result via chat.
– You can also always compose a new message to send the search result.
Users who have their keyboard shortcuts activated will be able to hit the g key to go to the search box when they’re not composing a message. When they are composing, control+g will do the trick.
