
Ask HN: Why is Gmail search so bad? - kuhhk
Compared to Google search, why is Gmail search so bad? I can rarely find anything, and searching chat history is impossible too.
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ma2rten
I don't think there is anything wrong with it.

It just matches terms literally and shows matching emails in chronological
order. It doesn't do ranking and non-literal matches like web search does. I
think this is the right way of doing it.

Also, the gmail team has to work with a lot of restrictions because of
privacy. They are not allowed to look at user's email ever. That would make it
hard to do ranking.

Maybe this helps:
[https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7190?hl=en](https://support.google.com/mail/answer/7190?hl=en)

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ecwilson
I'm not a search engineer, but here's my understanding.

Gmail search isn't bad, it just is using a less complete set of signals to
intuit what you're searching for. It's more of a "garbage in, garbage out"
model than a "we can intuit what you want based on how millions of other
people have reacted to the results of this query." That's because you're the
only one searching against this data set (your email).

What's an example of something you've had trouble finding via search? There
might be better ways to conduct your search. I've lived for 10+ years with my
primary organization strategy being to rely on Gmail search, and have found it
extremely effective.

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plicense
Can you give examples of why its bad? While it isn't as contextual as it can
be like web-search, I haven't found it to be "bad". Slack's search is what I
call bad

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peshkira
... or Trello

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spike021
That one's the worst.

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airstrike
It may suck compared to Google search, but God forbid you need to rely on,
say, Outlook 2010 for searching old e-mails...

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ptrincr
I really love outlook as an email client, at least on Windows. On a mac it
still needs some work. It's getting better as more features are added.

Must admit though, searching is always a bit of a pain, sometimes I can't seem
to find emails that I know for sure are there, and after some browsing I'm
able to find them.

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airstrike
Agreed. Most of the time I just resort to right-clicking an e-mail and
choosing Find Related > Messages [from sender | in this conversation]

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Alex3917
What's so hard about searching chat history? If you just use in:chat, that
works fine for me. For anything else, just using in:all usually surfaces
threads with the relevant terms, although you can also filter out stuff in the
social and promotion tabs if you don't want results from mailing lists or
whatever.

There are a few advanced search operators that should be there that are
missing, like finding the threads with the most number of messages. And the
APIs are missing some functionality also, but overall it seems to work pretty
well.

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dplgk
Related question: why is my chat history there? I never asked for that.

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danso
Maybe the vast majority of users expect GChat, which was traditionally inside
of GMail, to be part of GMail.

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robszumski
Another example: why is Google Drive search so bad?

It seems like there is rich data to train a model on: graph of shares between
the org, comment activity, time open, collective time spent writing, etc.

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jessriedel
Let me add some obvious failings since people seem surprised: The Android
Gmail app clearly does separate searches for emails stored on the device and
emails that are only in the cloud. The time for the cloud search is very
variable, and if it the connection goes bad then there is no indication to the
user. This means the same search will mysteriously return different things
depending on the connection quality. And if the user is waiting for the cloud
results to appear, there is no feedback whatsoever about whether they have
almost arrived or whether gmail has given up.

The fact that is it literal matches only seem inexcusable. Sure, the magically
ability to guess what your meant isn't going to be available when you're the
only one searching your database and there are privacy restrictions, but even
just basic spellcheck or near matches would be extremely useful.

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kenhwang
All the Google search sub-feature in their products that's not _the_ Google
search product have pretty mediocre results. Gmail is no exception.

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gusmd
I agree. Youtube included. I frequently find myself using Google to search for
a Youtube video. It is usually better than searching Youtube itself.

~~~
ma2rten
The YouTube search team works closely with the web search team and uses many
of the same technologies. However, they optimize for different metrics and
goals.

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icedchai
It might help to search on terms that are actually in your emails. This never
fails for me.

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jjbinx007
Google seems to favour desktop search over mobile for some reason. I can't
search chats from my phone (but I can from desktop), I can't even set up
filters from mobile.

There are some search tricks you can employ from the desktop to help finding
stuff easier (e.g. narrow by date) so I'd recommend you use these on desktop
to try to locate what you need. When you find it, apply a tag to make finding
it easier in the future.

[https://business.tutsplus.com/tutorials/how-to-search-
your-e...](https://business.tutsplus.com/tutorials/how-to-search-your-emails-
in-gmail--cms-27445)

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seba_dos1
At least searching chat history used to work well back in the XMPP era of
Google Talk. It feels like it the search quality strongly declined in last
years.

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cm2012
It works great for me.

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nanny
What? I love Gmail and Hangouts search. I'll be very upset when they get rid
of Hangouts because it's so convenient to search. What's frustrating is that
you can't search Hangouts on mobile without going to the desktop Gmail
website.

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Tomis02
When searching old mails I get the distinct feeling they're gone, never to
come back ever again. Yes, data loss. I can't prove it because I don't have
those emails stored offline.

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jacksmith21006
Find Gmail search fine and use all the time as I am messy. It is super fast.

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slater
Because your e-mails aren't saved on pinterest.com

