The GMail Labs ^[1] programme keeps on coming up with awesome nifty features that make emailing more powerful. This time, they've brought Google Search right into GMail ^[2] with the "Google Search in GMail" labs. On enabling this feature from labs settings, you'll see a google search box at the left side in GMail, this is different from the search feature already available in Gmail. Searching for something using this search box will load the top search results in a box (similar to the chat and tasks boxes, but, a little bigger). This ensures that you stay right in GMail, even when you have to search for something, thereby increasing productivity. You can insert the search results without copy-pasting by clicking on a drop down arrow that shows up when you hover over a result. It's kind of intelligent that the available actions shown by the drop down arrow depends on where you are while searching. That is, if you were composing a mail, you'll have "Insert into the email", if you were reading a mail there'll be "Start a reply with the result inserted", and if you were on a chat, you'll have "Send this result by chat to".

If you have keyboard shortcuts ^[3] turned on, typing g and then / will take you to the search box when you're not composing, and Ctrl + g will do it when you're composing (that's ⌘ + g for Mac users).

Tip: If you use labels and have keyboard shortcuts enabled, typing 'g' and then 'l' (meaning Goto Label) will pop up a box where you can type the name of the label and go there. You can see how this works in our earlier tutorial about Browsing Labels more Quickly in Gmail ^[4]. Now that there are 45+ labs features available in GMail, we suggest you to use the "Navbar-drag and drop" feature so that you can arrange the different modules to the left and right of your inbox.