There’s a new feature available in Gmail Labs that will help make Google serve as your one-stop shop for cloud-based communications and file storage. Already the service is letting users use Google Docs as a Web drive, and now the company is bringing Docs and Gmail even closer.
Rather than treating Gmail and Docs as two completely separate places for file storage, the new labs feature brings the two services into a common search from the Gmail interface.
The blog post on the Gmail Blog describes the obvious scenario quite aptly:
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. With the new “Apps Search” lab, we just made that all a bit simpler.
Now, the search bar in Gmail allows you to search both Gmail and Google Docs at the same time. While it’s a simple addition, it’s a very useful addition. We don’t know about you, but for us Gmail acts like another hard drive, with thousands of emails and attachments galore in the archives. And with the integration of Google apps like Gtalk, Calendar and Docs, Gmail serves as a sort of dashboard, an always-open tab in our browser.
In addition to the search feature, Google notes that it will now correct mistyped searches, just as it does with its standard Web search.
