Google Drastically Improves Gmail With Auto-Complete

With close to 200 million users, Gmail has long been one of the best email services out there and the choice of many people who work and spend a lot of time online. The one feature that has set the company apart is their search (you would expect Google to be good at that, in fairness) function within your large inbox and today, Google is taking a step towards improving that even further by introducing the auto complete function within the search results.

This is the same auto-complete that it introduced to search results last year and that improved the speed and efficiency that searched for stuff on the web. The big difference here is that the auto-complete will only work for the contents of your own mail box meaning that you can scan through your inbox much quicker and, in theory, find your emails far more efficiently. This is one of those features that most people will find annoying at first, but once you start getting used to it for a couple of weeks, you will never be able to do without it again in the future.

The only downside is that once again paying Google customers will be treated as second class citizens:

We will be rolling out improved autocomplete in English over the next few days and will follow with more languages over the next few months. While initially improved autocomplete will not be available for Google Apps customers, we plan to bring this feature to Apps domains in the future.

Everybody is always looking for some sort of new service that will replace email once and for all, but if you ask me, it’s innovation like this that will keep Google and Gmail ahead of the pack for some time to come.