San Francisco — Competing to make it more tempting for users, Google has released a new labs add-on for Gmail today that fine-tunes the services’ search tool, providing suggestions for contacts and search modifiers as you type. The new Search Autocomplete feature is similar to Google Suggest for your inbox. Start typing in the search box, and it gives you suggestions as you type, and Google has added more search operators.
Once enabled, Google says, “with the new auto-complete Labs feature you can simply start typing and it will start offering you suggestions for your search, select the desired contact from the drop down list. Easy and quick as that.”
In addition to auto-complete, Google has added more power to its search operators to make search more efficient, which you see below the list of recommended contacts.
This means that when you start searching for messages from a specific person, the first suggestions that it automatically provides are “names / email addresses,” because these are the most popular kind of searches conducted in Gmail, just like it does when you are composing a new message.
“Some names are not easy to remember (my last name is an excellent example!) — with this new Labs feature you can just type a couple letters and select the desired contact from the drop down list,” says Ibrahim Bokharouss at the Gmail Blog.
Bokharouss also explains that Gmail offers a bunch of advanced search operators that lets you search in specific places (e.g., in chats or sent items), or search for messages with attachments of a certain type (e.g. docs or photos). On top of that, it will let you add specific types of attachments or file formats when you need to find a specific email with a certain attachment. You can view the entire list of search operators and what they do at this Gmail Help Page.
While you could avail many of these options just from using Gmail’s advanced search tool, the one for searching images is especially helpful as Bokharouss points out. With Search Autocomplete, you can just start typing “photos” or “pictures” for example, and you will get “has photos” in the drop down menu. “Att” will bring up more options:
Of course to switch on the Search Autocomplete lab, simply go to settings and the “labs” tab and scroll through the labs features until you find it. You will probably notice some other useful ones to activate as well.