Google’s Rick Klau points out that homepage for Google Profiles is missing a pretty obvious feature – search. While Google profiles are tied into your Google account as a whole, when it comes to Google Buzz, your Google profile is essentially your Wall. All your Buzz posts appear here, and so do any of your personal links you want people to see.

About four weeks ago, Gmail gained a drag-and-drop feature that made attaching files to emails considerably more convenient.  Now, as a sort of complement to that text-focused upgrade, another new feature is set to make inserting pictures into emails easier, as well.

A noteworthy point here is that Google’s skipped past the beta/lab stage, offering the new option to lots of ordinary Gmail users.  Another important fact is that it’s user-friendly – the sort of thing even people who don’t read WebProNews and official Google blogs might discover for themselves.

Privacy Awareness Week is perhaps not working out the way Google would have liked.  There’s word this afternoon that officials at the University of California, Davis have decided not to deploy Gmail on a campus-wide basis due to privacy concerns.

Four and a half years ago, Google lost the right to use the term "Gmail" in the UK due to a trademark dispute, and ever since, "Google Mail" is what its email service has been called in the region.  Only now, Google’s finally ditching the two-word moniker and going back to good old Gmail.

Sharing one’s password is considered a huge security sin; a recent Symantec survey made clear that telling it to even a boss or spouse is verboten.  Gmail users may be glad to hear, then, that Google has figured out a way to encourage the creation of Gmail-related apps without asking everyone to compromise on the password issue.

Google introduced a new security feature for Gmail today. It notifies the user when a suspicious log-in activity is detected on their account. This notification will come in the form of a message saying ""Warning: We believe your account was last accessed from…" along with the geographic region that Google can best associate with the access. Engineering Director Pavni Diwanji explains on the Gmail Blog:

It looks like the people in charge of Gmail Labs have decided to do a little spring (or more accurately, late winter) cleaning.  They’ve removed a full 11 experimental features from Labs, with six of the bunch becoming regular Gmail features and the other five failing to make the cut.

Update 2: Buzz has gotten off to a great start in terms of attracting users. Google said in a blog post yesterday that over 9 million posts and comments had been created, and they were seeing over 200 posts per minute. Both numbers have likely grown since then.

The competition between Google and Apple appears to be getting fiercer by the day. Google has now acquired popular iPhone app reMail, and has discontinued it in Apple’s App Store, and most likely offer it in the Android Market (although this has not been confirmed).

Update: In case there is any confusion, Google will not be taking Buzz out of Gmail. The company issued this statement after some confusion in the blogosphere:

This day will go down in history as the day of Google Buzz. After Google’s press event (which we live-blogged and discussed here) Google put up several posts explaining more about the "buzzworthy" new product.

Google is rumored to be working on a Facebook/Twitter-like feature for Gmail. According to the Wall Street Journal, who cites "people familiar with the matter", the feature, which would "make it easier and faster" to share status updates may launch as soon as this week.

Last year, Google released a Gmail Labs feature that added a search box for regular Google Search within Gmail. The lab is simply called Google search. However, it didn’t provide all of the features that the real Google search does. They have now taken steps to improve the feature’s capabilities in the following areas:

Google has made some changes to the way ads shown to Gmail users are selected. If you use the service, you have probably noticed that Google often shows ads that are somehow related to the content of whatever piece of email you are currently reading. If you have noticed this, you have probably also noticed that sometimes the ads don’t seem to have anything to do with your conversation whatsoever.

Google recently announced that it was launching a new feature for Google Docs, which would allow users to upload and store any kind of file. What may not have been clear, however, is that this new storage from Google isn’t limited to just Google Docs.

The company is saying that Gmail and Picasa storage can also be used. Google Docs Product Marketing Manager Peter Harbison writes:

As news of Google’s China situation dominates headlines, the company has also announced that it is turning on https access for Gmail as the default (Gmail accounts were hacked in China, in case you haven’t read about that yet).

Https, which stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure is used to provide encryption and secure ID. Back in 2008 Google started giving users the option to use it.

Google released a stunning blog post that details a "sophisticated and targeted attack" on Gmail that "resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google".

Google notes that the attack was not just on Google infrastructure but also on more than twenty other companies from various industries. Google states that they are working with the authorities in the U.S. and will be notifying the companies of the breaches.

If you ever set out to collect personal email addresses at a tech gathering, here’s a tip: generally speaking, you can save time by typing or writing out the "@gmail" part before approaching people.  But Compete provided a bit of a reality check today by showing that Hotmail remains in the top spot overall.

Update: VerticalResponse CEO Janine Popick has written a separate piece adding 10 more reasons.

Google has added a feature to Gmail, which allows users to merge all of their duplicate contacts into one. Until now, users have had to go through contacts one-by-one in order to clean up their list.

"Managing a big address book can be a challenge, so it’s no surprise that the top request for Google contacts is a fast, easy way to merge duplicate contacts," says software engineer for Gmail, Dominik Marcinski.

Gmail’s offline feature has graduated from Gmail Labs, and is now a full-blown feature of Google’s email service. The feature emerged as a lab experiment nearly a year ago, but it has now been deemed ready for primetime.