14 DAY TRIAL // One of the 'cloud's' great promises is that it would make finding stuff a lot easier, everything is going to be in the same place, accessible from everywhere, just a few clicks away.
In reality, the cloud probably makes it worse, with dozens of different services from different providers, each covering one niche, it's getting harder to know where to look for the file or the document you need.
Google is taking a first, small step in rectifying this, with the new "Apps Search" which enables users to search for files or snippets of text regardless if they're attached to emails or stored in Google Docs.
"Where is that presentation? Was it attached to an email? Or in Google Docs? If you’re not sure, you may end up searching several places with the same query in order to find it," Bram Moolenaar, Software Engineer at Gmail, wrote.
"With the new 'Apps Search' lab in Gmail, we just made that all a bit simpler. Once you enable it from the Gmail Labs tab under Settings, the 'Search Mail' button in Gmail will say 'Search Mail and Docs' instead, and your search results will include matching documents and sites in addition to email messages," he added.
Enabling the "Apps Search" Gmail Labs experiment will change the way the search feature works. You'll still get all of the results from emails, and straight away just like you always did, but you'll also get results from Docs and Sites below the regular ones.
The feature is just an experiment, but it's one that Google will definitely follow up on and it's very likely that it will be graduated as a full-blown Gmail feature at some point. It's also very likely that it will be integrated in Docs and possibly other services.
Along with the new search feature, Gmail added "Did you mean?" suggestions to search to make it easier to find what you're looking for even if you're prone to misspelling words.