Firefox with Greasemonkey: If you find search results on popular search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo Search to be a bit bland, Colorful Search will color code and group your searches for easier identification.

Once you’ve installed Colorful Search, every time you perform a search at the supported services—Google, Bing, and Yahoo—the search results will be color coded. The color coding occurs based on domain so you can easily see if the results for your search are coming from the same place. In the screenshot above—a portion of the Google search results for “Lifehacker”—you can see results from multiple domains are colored differently.

Have a handy tool for enhancing search results? Let’s hear about it in the comments. Colorful Search is a Greasemonkey script and works wherever Firefox does.

So often, writing an email involves opening a new tab to look up something, copying the link, then heading back to paste it. Gmail’s latest Labs feature consolidates that process with pop-up Google searches.

Once you enable the Google Search feature in Gmail’s Labs menu, you’ll see a new Google Search bar in Gmail’s left-hand sidebar. Depending on whether you’re in the inbox, writing a new mail, or replying to someone else’s message, what happens after you type your search and hit enter varies a little bit, but it’s all meant to help you search and insert direct links and search result references in your emails.

So, for example, when you’re composing a new email, searching from the left-side box will pop up a window just like a chat message with the first few results. Hover over the bottom-right of any result, and a drop-down menu lets you paste that result’s direct URL (instead of the common Google click-tracking gobbledy-gook), paste a link to the Google search results page, or pop open a new message with that link auto-inserted. Search from the inbox, and you can start a new message with a search result.

Pretty neat stuff, and pretty handy in certain cases, too. Gmail’s making it easier and easier to do more and more from a single browser window.