Gmail Search Becomes More Like Google Search

Last year, Google released a Gmail Labs feature that added a search box for regular Google Search within Gmail. The lab is simply called Google search. However, it didn't provide all of the features that the real Google search does. They have now taken steps to improve the feature's capabilities in the following areas:

- Dictionary definitions
- Spelling corrections
- Calculations
- Local results
- Weather
- News

You can now enter "define" and a word in the search box to retrieve a definition. If you spell something wrong, it will ask you if you meant something else. If you type in a math expression, you'll get the calculation. You can search for a specific place or for things near a specific place and get map results (although Google said this feature will become available in a few weeks). It will also show you the More Info link, which will take you to a place page.

You can type "weather" followed by your city and state (or country) or zip code and get local weather results not unlike what you would get in a regular Google search. If your query matches something in the news, you may get some news results.

The new features are available in all languages that Gmail supports. They have also added a search button to the toolbar when you compose a message. With this, you can select text, click the button, and it will search for that. If you don't select text, it will just bring up a search box.

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Microsoft Takes Users Behind Bing

Microsoft has launched a new site for Bing, where users can go to find out the latest features that have been implemented into the search engine (excuse me, "decision engine"). The site's called Behind Bing.

"You can see each feature in action though a screencast, see me talk about why we did it the way we did (for those who like to geek out), and get some drill-down details," says Bing's Stefan Weitz. "For those of you pressed for time, check out 'Features for You' at the bottom of the site which highlights some features that I thought were especially cool depending on what and where you are."

Highlighted on the site currently are sections looking at:

- Real-time search
- Bing Local
- Weather/Event results
- Enhanced Results
- Enhanced hover
- Bing for mobile
- Videos
- Bing Travel
- Bing Health
- Visual Search
- Bing Shopping
- Wolfram Alpha
- Search Sharing
- Reference

There are videos and other sections for "explore," "overview," and "insight guide." If you don't regularly keep up with Bing's announcements or search news in general, this should serve as a good place to check out from time to time just to see what the search engine has been up to, and to stay informed about any functionalities that you may have otherwise missed. That will of course require that Microsoft keeps it updated. 

On a related note, all of the features that Bing announced last week are supposed to be "100%" live now for all users, but that doesn't seem to be accurate, as I am not able to access some of the new stuff yet.

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