Gmail continues to grow in features (Will it ever move out of Beta stage?) with the Gmail labs team working hard to put in unique and innovative features. On April 29th, Gmail introduced extra emoticons to successfully capture the entirety of human expression. The new Labs feature is called Extra Emoji and can be enabled by simply visiting the Settings > Labs tab.
The other new feature in Labs is called Google search in Gmail and can be accessed the same way in the Settings > Labs tab. With this on, a new search box on the left side of your inbox is embedded, like this:
You can type in your search query and a window appears at the bottom of the screen with the first few search results (why just the first few, I wonder?).
Clicking on the search result opens up another window and then moving your mouse over the result back in Gmail reveals a pull-down menu that gives you more options to do stuff with the search result.
The menu options depend on what you’re doing in Gmail:
- 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 compose a new message to send the search result.
