Soon, all users in the U.S. will be getting this functionality. Google software engineer Balazs Racz says in a brief blog post:

As part of field trial we opened in October, it became possible to instantly see your relevant emails, Google Drive files, Calendar events, and more when you search in Gmail. Those of you who participated in the field trial told us that you like the time-saving convenience of searching for all your stuff from one place, and over the coming week, we’ll be rolling out this feature in English to all U.S. users. Now you can find what you’re looking for faster right in Gmail.

The feature is nice, but the part of the field trial that lets users retrieve content from Gmail, Google Drive and Google Calendar when searching Google’s regular web search is even better. It remains to be seen when this functionality will become available to all.

Which new Google feature are you most excited about? Let us know in the comments.

We’re not going to get into all the announcements here. You can follow this page to see all of that. I do, however, want to draw attention to some of the things Google has announced that have implications specifically for businesses. It’s worth noting that a lot of Google’s announcements came in blog posts, rather than in the keynote.

Maps

One of the biggest announcements to come out the event was a complete overhaul of Google Maps. This was expected thanks to a leak last week, and then another one earlier this week, but it is still a huge deal, as Google Maps is one of the company’s most popular products. It also plays a major role in how people find businesses using Google from the desktop, tablets, and from mobile devices. Google actually announced revamps for each of these devices as well.

The new Google Maps for Android smartphones and iPhones is coming this summer, and will include a new Zagat experience, with Zagat badges appearing in the interface, as well as Google Offers integration. If you find Starbucks, for example, you can see an offer from them, and save it for later or use it.

There is also a new five point rating scale across Google Maps for mobile and desktop.

With the new tablet interface, Google will point users to businesses and destinations by categories with a new discovery feature called “Explore”.

With the new desktop Maps experience, Google highlights things it thinks matter to users. “And the more you interact with the map, the better it gets,” says Google. “When you set your Home and Work locations, star favorite places, write reviews and share with friends, Google Maps will build even more useful maps with recommendations for places you might enjoy.”

“In addition to a customized map, we’ve also made it easier to uncover the best local gems,” the company says. “Search results are labeled directly on the map with brief place descriptions and icons that highlight business categories and other useful information – like restaurants that are recommended by your Google+ friends. Info cards provide helpful information such as business hours, and ratings and reviews so you can quickly decide where to eat, drink and play.”

The interface also allows people to zoom in right into indoor imagery, where available.

More on the new Maps here.

Search

Changes to how Google does search are always of interest to businesses, because it’s the top way people find them. There’s not necessarily a lot in the way of SEO news coming out of Google I/O (though there was certainly plenty from Matt Cutts earlier this week), but you should still be aware of the search announcements that were made.

The biggest thing is that Google is bringing the conversational search that Android and iOS users have been enjoying to the desktop via Chrome. Soon, users will simply be able to talk to Google when they want to know something, and Google will talk back. Google SVP Amit Singhal discusses this on the Inside Search Blog:

People communicate with each other by conversation, not by typing keywords — and we’ve been hard at work to make Google understand and answer your questions more like people do. Already, you can tap a mic, talk to Google in a more natural way and get responses spoken back to you on Android, iPhone, and iPad devices.

Today, we previewed what this conversational experience will look like in Chrome on your desktops and laptops. Soon, you’ll be able to just say, hands-free, “OK Google, will it be sunny in Santa Cruz this weekend?” and get a spoken answer. Then, you’ll be able to continue the conversation and just follow up with “how far is it from here?” if you care about the drive or “how about Monterey?” if you want to check weather somewhere else, and get Google to tell you the answer.

He also announced improvements to Google’s Knowledge Graph, including newly supported languages, and the ability to provide answers to what it thinks will be your next questions.

Singhal explains, “You’ll also get smarter answers to questions like ‘what’s the population of Canada?’ Not only will Google answer that question, but you also get an answer to the next few follow-up questions people often ask. In a single card, you’ll see how Canada’s population changed over time — and a comparison with California and Australia.”

Finally, Google Now got some new cards, and the ability for users to set reminders. More on all of this here.

While not part of the Google I/O announcements, Matt Cutts also made another announcement via Twitter. He said, “It’s safe to assume webspam will continue to tackle link networks that violate” Google’s quality guidelines, and that they just took action on thousands of linkselers in a “paid-link-that-passes-PageRank” network.

YouTube Gets New Ecommerce Feature

Also not part of the keynote announcements, Google announced a feature for YouTube, which could prove to be a pretty big deal in ecommerce. They’re now letting businesses include “Buy Now” buttons on their YouTube channels, so users can purchase products through various retailers.

“Every day, millions of people turn to YouTube for advice, from learning how to do the perfect smokey eye to trying out a new recipe for mashed potatoes,” says Danielle Tomassini from the Google Shopper team. “People are using YouTube not just for entertainment, but to learn a new skill, find more information, and shop for products. This presents a unique opportunity for consumer goods brands to reach shoppers in the moment and provide them with an easy way to go from watching a video to purchasing the product.”

The new offering comes in the form of a new channel gadget, and lets users shop for products from various retailers from the comfort of the YouTube channel they’re already browsing.

“This new channel gadget will enable shoppers to seamlessly move from browsing how-to videos and featured products to finding which retailers carry them, check availability, compare prices and make a purchase, all with fewer clicks than today,” says Tomassini.

Google has launched the gadget with Unilever to highlight hair products from TRESemmé.

Curiously, the offering is not part of the Google Shopping ecosystem Google has created, but rather utilizes GloTo.

More about this here.

Google Wallet And Gmail

There are a lot of interesting things happening with Google Wallet.

For one, there’s a new API that could have a huge impact on converting mobile sales. According to Google, 97% of mobile shoppers abandon their shopping carts. This is mostly due to all of the hoops they have to go through to complete the process (like filling out big forms). The Instant Buy API makes the process much faster and easier.

“The Instant Buy API is designed for merchants and developers selling physical goods and services, who already have a payment processor and are looking to simplify the checkout experience for their customers,” says Prakash Hariramani, Senior Product Manager for Google Wallet. “Developers selling digital goods within their apps will continue to use Google Play In-app Billing, which offers full payment processing capability, including support for carrier billing and gift cards.”

Google has also introduced the ability to send money with Google Wallet through Gmail. They’ve basically added the functionality to send money as an attachment.

And speaking of Gmail, Google is adding quick actions to let people RSVP, check-in and leave reviews right from their inboxes. Buttons will appear next to certain types of messages, and people can take actions without even having to open the email. Businesses can add custom actions to their emails.

Google announced the Google Wallet Objects API to let businesses connect loyalty programs, offers, etc. to Google Wallet.

“Consumers want access to all of their loyalty cards, offers, and more on their smartphone,” says Group Product Manager Pali Bhat. “An average household has 18 loyalty cards but use less than half of these cards regularly because of the inconvenience. And the same goes for tickets, membership cards and other items.”

Users will be able to save loyalty programs, offers, etc. directly to their Google Wallet, and businesses will be able to showcase their brands, acquire users and engage them through instant loyalty sign-up, real time updates and offers.

“With Google’s location services, your users get timely notifications about their saved Wallet objects,” notes Bhat. “Additionally, with a simple upgrade path to Google Offers, you can distribute your offers across Google properties — including Adwords, the Google Display Network and Google Maps for Mobile — and benefit from Google’s targeting capabilities.”

They also announced that more phones – Samsung Galaxy S4 (Sprint), HTC One (Sprint) & Samsung Galaxy Note II (Sprint & US Cellular) – get the Google Wallet app.

Google+

Google+ has received a total of 41 new features, and a general redesign, and it could present some new opportunities and challenges in getting your content seen in Google’s growing social network. Included is a multi-column layout, bigger media, new animations, and a “related hashtags” feature:

“Suppose, for example, that you’re reading about your favorite sports team,” says Google SVP Vic Gundotra. “We’ll look at the post, determine what it’s about, and tag it accordingly. Behind the scenes, we’ll also identify and rank relevant conversations across the network. When you click on the related hashtag, we’ll flip the card, and let you browse related content inline.”

It looks like Google+ optimization could get more complex (as it certainly has with rival Facebook, not to mention Google’s crown jewel – search). More on the rest of the features here.

Google Cloud Platform

Google made some announcements about its Cloud Platform, including making Google Compute Engine available to all businesses and developers. It comes with sub-hour billing charges for instances in one-minute increments with a ten-minute minimum, so you don’t pay for minutes you don’t use.

“Shared-core instances provide smaller instance shapes for low-intensity workloads,” says Google’s Urs Hölzle. “Shared-core instances provide smaller instance shapes for low-intensity workloads. Advanced Routing features help you create gateways and VPN servers, and enable you to build applications that span your local network and Google’s cloud. Large persistent disks support up to 10 terabytes per volume, which translates to 10X the industry standard.”

This is really all just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to new stuff Google has in store, but these are some of the things businesses should be paying attention to. Of course, it really depends on what type of business you run. Android developers have a ton of new stuff to dig into that we didn’t even mention here, for example.

Which new Google offering (if any) do you think will have the greatest impact on your business? Tell us in the comments.

Starting today, Google will begin to roll out a few new quick actions inside Gmail, including event invite responses that link to Google Calendar, places reviews that let you rate a restaurant, for instance, right inside Gmail, and one-click actions like confirming a product or site registration via email.

“These buttons appear next to certain types of messages in your inbox and let you take action on an email without ever having to open it. For example, you can RSVP to your friend’s party invitation or rate that restaurant you went to last night all right from the inbox. You’ll be checking things off that to-do list in no time,” says Google.

Another quick action involves check-ins for flights. Although the quick action button in this scenario takes you outside of Gmail for confirmation, flight emails now feature a useful card with all the pertinent info – time of departure, terminal and gate, estimated arrival time, and whether of not the flight is on time.

Google is also asking developers to add custom actions to their emails, and they say that they hope to add many more action in the near future. Developers can go here for more info. These new actions should hit your Gmail inbox in the coming weeks.

If you’re curious about more new stuff from Google (and there’s a lot of it), check out all the news from Wednesday’s I/O conference keynote.

On the Gmail blog, Google announced new Google Wallet integration for Gmail, which comes in the form of an “Attach Money” button. Yep, you can send money as an attachment. A pretty good idea, as long as it doesn’t land in the spam folder.

The feature lets you send money by email even if the recipient does not have a Gmail address.

“It’s free to send money if your bank account is linked to Google Wallet or using your Google Wallet Balance, and low fees apply to send money using your linked credit or debit card,” says Google Wallet product manager Travis Green. “To send money in Gmail, hover over the attachment paperclip, click the $ icon to attach money to your message, enter the amount you wish to send, and press send.”

The feature will only be available for desktop at first, but will likely come to mobile Gmail in the future. In the meantime, you can still use the Google Wallet app or wallet.google.com.

The feature is rolling out over the coming months to U.S. Gmail users who are 18 and over.

Google announced today that its unifying storage across Gmail, Google+ photos and Google Drive accounts. To be specific, Google account holders now have 15GB to store all of their content across all three services. Here’s how Google describes it:

With this new combined storage space, you won’t have to worry about how much you’re storing and where. For example, maybe you’re a heavy Gmail user but light on photos, or perhaps you were bumping up against your Drive storage limit but were only using 2 GB in Gmail. Now it doesn’t matter, because you can use your storage the way you want.

Google is also updating its Google Drive storage page to better reflect how much data is being used across all three services. By hovering over the pie chart, it will bring up how much data each service is using:

As you can see in the above image, Google will soon be eliminating the option to upgrade to 25GB of storage for $2.49 a month. With the move to 15GB of unified storage, Google Drive users can upgrade to either 100GB for $4.99 a month, or 200GB for $9.99 a month.

This all sounds well and good, but what about Google Apps users? Google didn’t forget about its enterprise customers as it will be giving them 30GB of unified storage across Google Drive, Gmail and Google+ photos. As always, files created in Docs, Sheets and Slides won’t count against the limit, and only photos larger than 2048px will count towards the limit on Google+.

Regular Google account holders and Google Apps users will both start seeing the new unified storage system show up in their accounts over the coming weeks.

Anyway, Google is now officially 9, having launched in beta on April 1st, 2004. In celebration of that, Google has posted a fun little infographic that deals with the evolution of the product.

“Gmail was inspired by one user’s feedback that she was tired of struggling to find emails buried deep in her inbox. So we built a new email that leveraged the power of Google Search. You told us you were tired of spam, so we set to tackling that, and today your feedback makes it possible for Gmail to filter out well over 99% of incoming spam. You also said that you needed tools to deal with information overload, so we introduced Priority Inbox to help you manage your email (and we’re still exploring new ways to it even easier),” says Google software engineer Zohair Hyder.

As you march through the past 9 years of Gmail, you remember that it took Google nearly two years to add Gchat to Gmail, and how long it took for Google to open up signups Gmail (three years after the beta launch). Not everything that’s happened with Gmail has been a hit with users (for a recent example, check out the reaction to the new compose box), but with hundreds of millions of active users, I guess we can say that we’re pretty happy that Gmail is around. It’s a lot more useful than most 9-year-olds I know, let’s put it that way.

Check out a trip down Gmail memory lane below (click to enlarge):

Starting today, Google begins the global rollout of new autocomplete predictions for your past Gmail searches.

“If you’ve searched your email for ‘supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’ or other lengthy phrases, it just got easier to find what you’re looking for. Autocomplete predictions in Gmail may now include your past Gmail searches,” says Google.

Also rolling out – contact thumbnails in Gmail search:

Google says that the global rollout of both of these features will take a few days and it even includes Google Apps for Business customers.

We think that these updates will probably go over a little better than the last update to hit Gmail. Last week, Google began pushing the new compose box to all users and there was a audible groan from a good portion of the Gmail-usiing population.

“Gmail launched nine years ago on April 1st, 2004,” says project manager Jonathan Zames. “Since then you’ve been able to use hundreds of new features that push the boundaries of what email can do and make it easier to get things done.”

“Starting today, you’ll get to experience the next big step for Gmail, Gmail Blue,” he adds.

You can see just how revolutionary this is by watching the video:

This is the latest example of “moonshot thinking” at Google, according to lead engineer Carl Branch.

It’s taken six years to develop the technology behind Gmail Blue, according to lead designer Dana Popliger.

“In trying to bring email into the 21st century, we are faced with a challenge: how do we completely redesign and recreate something while keeping it exactly the same?” explains project manager Richard Pargo.

Welcome to the future of email.

With the new compose enabled, Gmail no longer takes you to a different screen to write a message. When you click “compose,” a small message box pops up in the bottom-right-hand corner of the page. From there, you retain all the functionality of the old compose method – it’s just smaller and looks more like a chat box.

“You are busy people, so it’s no surprise that an overwhelming number of you opted to try out Gmail’s faster, simpler compose experience after it launched last October. In addition to telling us what you love about the new compose experience (like how much easier it is to multitask!) you’ve also been sending us helpful suggestions for what features you’d like to see added. As a result of your input, we’re now ready to introduce the new compose experience as the default for everyone. We’re looking forward to hearing what you think!” says Gmail Product Manager Phil Sharp.

Over the past few months, Google has been tweaking the new compose feature and has added the ability to send files with Google Drive, pop-out replies, and starring and labeling while composing.

Google says that the rollout will take a few days.

Overall, the compose box is pretty useful in some circumstances – especially when you’re writing an email and you have to reference another email. It simply saves a lot of time. You can also write multiple messages at a time and minimize any of them to finish later. It’s a solid improvement to the Gmail experience, and I doubt we’ll hear any bitching from Gmail users as the rollout proceeds.

“Indian culture is diverse, with more than 100 languages and thousands of alphabets used every day. Depending on where you are, you might hear anything from Gujarati to Bengali and Tamil to Urdu. If you’re a speaker of these languages and use a feature phone, communicating is about to get a little easier,” says Google.

The 6 new languages supported are Bengali,Gujarati, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil, and Telugu.

All you have to do is go to your settings and pick which language you want. All 6 new languages should be options as of right now.

“Some 500 million new users from around the world will join the Internet between now and 2015. Since most will experience the web for the first time on a mobile device, it’s important that people everywhere can communicate in the language they know best.” says Google Localization product manager Ian Hill.

Making Gmail access easier to an area with a dense, tech-loving population is smart and beneficial – for both the people speaking the Indic languages and for Google themselves.