It seems like I’m the resident Google Labs reporter here at gHacks, but truth be told, they have been rolling out some cool features! Their latest is the ability to search Google inline from Gmail. Enabling the feature ads a Google search bar to the left sidebar in the Gmail interface. If you search from there, the results are presented in a pop up window much like the chat window, and top three results are shown (you can navigate to the others).
You can use this as a jump start for searching, clicking on the result to open it in a new window, but you can easily add it to an email, by selecting “reply with result”. This will paste the whole result you selected into the email. This is a convenient, and pretty fast way of sharing search results. I find that it is fastest if I already know the answer to the question. For research I like big ol’ regular Google, but if I already know what I need I can get it very easily like this.
Another side-feature which is worth noting is that Gmail has a hundred or so more emoticons available in a labs feature called Extra Emoji. I pretty much hate all emoticons, so you won’t see me using this, but if you like the “no-end fun” these bring to your emails you might like to try them out. They have icons for wine, hurricanes, rabbits and whatnot, stuff I mention regularly in all my emails…
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[...] Inline Google Search in Gmail [...]