That’s right. You don’t need to open Gmail Inbox to do the search to find out emails in your Gmail. All you need is a Chrome browser with signed in Gmail account already.

And here is how you can do it.

Open Chrome Settings page, click Manage search engines… button, and add a customized search engine under Other search engines. There are 3 fields that you need to fill to perform a search in Gmail.

Field 1 (Add a new search engine): Gmail
Field 2 (Keyword): gmail or any name that is easy to remember.
Field 3 (Url): https://mail.google.com/mail/#search/%s

That’s all you need to set up. Close Settings page and it’s time to run a test. Open a new tab, and type gmail in the omnibar, aka Search/Address bar, and hit the spacebar. You should see Search Gmail: highlighted in omnibar. Now type your search keywords and press Enter.

This gives you matching results right in your inbox. If you are logged in with multiple Gmail accounts, the first account you signed into will be the one that gets searched.