New York — Continuing the erosion of Web page identity, search engine giant Google Inc. has lately been busy improving its popular email service, just last weekend announced the introduction of a new search capability in Gmail, as a Google Labs experiment, which empower users to search the Web right from their Gmail account. And what’s more, they added 1,200 emoticon selections from Japan as well.
For users who do not wish to leave the comfort of their Gmail account page, your day has come: The optional feature, which can be activated in Gmail Labs under the Settings tab, allows users to search the Internet without opening a new browser window.
“People would ask me questions, over chat or email, and I would have to leave Gmail to search Google for an answer. Then I would have to select the answer, copy it, go back to Gmail and paste the answer into the chat window or my reply,” software engineer Adam de Boor explained in a blog post.
With the new Google Search experiment in Gmail Labs, my problem is solved.
According to de Boor’s blog post, which mentioned that after users activate the applications feature on from the Labs tab under Settings, they will see a new search box on the left side of your inbox, like this:
Here, they can simply type in their search request, and a window (like a chat window, but a bit bigger) appears at the bottom of the screen with the first few search results. Users can click on a search result and it will open up in another window (or another tab) so one can make sure it is what one is looking for. Once a user has determined it is the correct result, moving the mouse over the result back in Gmail reveals a pull-down menu that lets users manipulate the search result.
The pull-down menu changes depending on what the user is doing in Gmail: If reading a message, users can start a reply to the message with the search result as the first thing in the reply. If writing a message, one can paste the result, or just the URL into the message. If users are chatting with friends, they can send the search result via chat. “You can also always compose a new message to send the search result,” de Boor wrote.
Also de Boor noted, users can easily insert the search results into chats and e-mails. De Boor also recommended enabling the “Navbar drag and drop” in Labs to move the web search box up to the top of the page for easier access.
If you have keyboard shortcuts turned on, typing g and then / will take you to the search box when you are not composing, and Ctrl + g will do it when you’re composing (that is ⌘ + g for Mac users).
On a lighter side, Google also announced a less practical, but sure to be popular addition to Gmail Labs: Extra emoji, the “colorfully animated” brainchild of Google’s team in Japan, which consists of more than 1,200 emoticons. The original 19 emoticons (textual portrayal of a writer’s mood or facial expression used to alert a responder to the temper of a statement) were such a hit in Gmail, software engineer Darren Lewis wrote in a blog post, that the team felt responsible to expand the range of emotions and objects that could be represented.
“How could we have included a [emoticon dog] but not a cat? What if I want wine rather than [emoticon coffee mug]?” he asked. He directed users to the Labs tab under “Settings” where users can enable “Extra Emoji” and gain access to, among other things, a small dancing man, selected fruits, vegetables, animals and musical instruments and facial expressions.
“If you are curious how we had time to create another couple hundred emoticons when we are so busy doing important stuff like rewriting Gmail for mobile and making Gmail work offline, the answer is: we did not,” Lewis admits. “All of these extra emoticons are straight from the secret underground labs of some of the top Japanese mobile carriers, used with permission.”
Over the past few months, Google has added a number of new features to Gmail, including search autocomplete, support for various Indian languages and extra emoticons.