Tip: Get the Weather Instantly in Gmail

As I have shared, Gmail is my Ginsu Knife. As they roll out features, I keep finding new uses for them - sometimes inadvertently. 

Gmail has a cool Labs feature that puts a little search box in your sidebar. I use it all the time to pull up information for lifestream posts since I publish to my Posterous-powered site via email. This little box is already capable of quite a lot but it also can pull up the latest weather. 

All you need to do is enter in a city name and weather and you get the current conditions as well as the forecast. You can access the search box with a keyboard command too - just type in g then / - and enter your query.

Comments

[craignicol]

Nice weather tip. Another way I've found is to switch to GMail's "Tree" theme - the background changes according to the weather report at your "theme" location.

[Tom O'Brien]

Reminds me of showing off an automated speech recognition application for getting the weather to a NY cabbie years ago. He was not impressed. "when I want to know the weather I roll down the window"

[Liana Lehua]

Thanks for sharing. I love Google Search in Gmail. I love having the ability to create an email from my search results right from the popup window.

[Garin Kilpatrick]

I cannot find this option in the "Labs" section of my Google Apps email, although it is powered by gmail. I suppose this is a feature for @gmail.com only email accounts, for now.

[Johny Odds]

Wow, I did not know that...

[Leighton Cooke]

We have been having a lot of instant weather in Amsterdam of late

[Fernando Gutierrez]

@Gar1n Check again, I have two Google Apps accounts and I have Google Search in Gmail available on both. I think that all Labs features are available on GApps.I have another problem. I can only get weather in Farenheit, not Celsius. When I introduce this query in Google.com it answers with Celsius (it lets me chose and then remembers my preference), but not in the search gadget :(

[Garin Kilpatrick]

Thanks Fernando, but I checked again and it is not there. I run two different versions of apps for two different domains and in the Premiere version there is not even a "Labs" tab option. Standard verison has "Labs" but no weather widget is listed. I get weather straight to my iPhone anyways. :)

[Prof. Maurice]

I want to know more of you Sir.