Google finally soups up Gmail search

Inbox gets multiple personality

Google has at last added a new feature to Gmail Labs that allows users to simultaneously view multiple panes in the online email service without having to open another browser window.

The web kingpin noted on its corporate blog yesterday that the “experimental” feature had now gone live on its Gmail service.

Ultimately, the organised folk among you who are Gmail label junkies should find the new look easier and more manageable.

The feature, dubbed “Multiple Inboxes”, also offers improved search results, which up to now have been an unwieldy mess. It can be enabled via Gmail Labs, which has to be activated in your account. You can then select Multiple Inboxes from the list of options.

The name itself is misleading, however, as it doesn’t mean you can view messages from multiple accounts. Instead it allows you to set up five different panes that can be viewed simultaneously. Each pane requires you to manually enter a Gmail code, such as “label:beer”, which then obviously displays a list of emails tagged with the beer label.

A single pane can also combine attributes, making the system fairly flexible, despite there being a maximum of five panes to be displayed at once. All in all we think it’s a pretty nifty feature - but then it’s about time the search giant improved search in Gmail. ®