5 ms·

I wish they'd just fix search. I use Google Calendar heavily, averaging ~10 entries per day for the last 5+ years, and then some entries per day all the way ba

by buro9 11y ago

I wish they'd just fix search. I use Google Calendar heavily, averaging ~10 entries per day for the last 5+ years, and then some entries per day all the way back to when it was launched. I can put information in easily enough, and with a few IFTTT recipes I'm able to treat Google Calendar not just as a schedule for upcoming events, appointments and reminders, but as a historical log of everything I've done. It is a time based database of my life... a diary. I've automated my diary taking into Google Calendar. The what, where and when of everything ends up in one of 12 calendars (each calendar is effectively a label to categorise a whole group of events that have occurred). And it's brilliant. Except for the search. It's really difficult to get the information back out. If I search for something I know that has happened, or has happened frequently, Google will delightfully tell me that I have matched 200 results, and then show me a list of 9 or 10 of them, with no way to paginate the remainder or search the old ones (it only finds upcoming, not past). Search is broken on Google Calendar, to the point of being almost totally useless. Far better to rely on time as a search dimension and jump around dates until one manually finds whatever you were looking for. It's that broken. Compare to search on a product that has some love: Google Photos. Where now the miraculous occurs, I can search things like "Felicity skiing" and what will return are photos of my wife skiing, and an option to look at all other photos on those days. A simple search and all the results you want, and a single click to expand to view it in the wider context that makes sense. Google Calendar really needs a decent search. It feels far too much like writing to /dev/null at the moment. Your information went in there, but the chances of you finding it when you wish to reference it are pretty non-existent.

reitanqild 11y ago
You tried reporting it? I hate reporting things to them because their feedback seems tuned to discourage that behaviour, but between that and complaining here I have seen major improvements.
- kinkora 11y ago
  There is this constant pet peeve of mine with the Google Calendar App on Android where if you would like to delete an appointment, you can't do it anywhere else (week, month, day, etc) except in the appointment itself. Prior to Lollipop, one had to go into the appointment itself -> hit "edit" -> scroll all the way down to the bottom of the appointment details -> click giant delete button which filled the whole bottom bit. Lollipop is slightly better where you still have to click on the appointment itself but again, there are no obvious buttons except edit and the only way to delete it is to click on "menu" -> select delete. I tried reporting it and like any other support query that goes to google, it just goes into a giant black hole (ok, i exaggerate much.. more like 7 in 10 actually).
  - ikeboy 11y ago
    I wish there was a fast way to cancel all appointments for some period of time.
rawnlq 11y ago
It's actually just incredibly dumb UI. You see the little calendar on the left hand side? Click the date there to choose the "from" date for filtering the search. Completely unintuitive and undiscoverable IMO and only found out about it when googling the issue.
buro9 11y ago
Someone asked about how I do this stuff, and I guess why... I replied privately but the answer can be public: It's part manual, part-automated. I manually add travel itinerary items, tickets (for sports, shows, concerts), etc... at the time of purchase, with enough information such that I could arrive somewhere and that calendar entry can tell me everything... i.e. I even attach PDF tickets to calendar entries. I don't trust the automated Gmail stuff for this as I want to be sure it really got every important detail right. Then there's some IFTTT automation. These are things like "If I make a public Tweet" or "If I post to Instagram" or "If I bookmark something on Pinboard" or "If I make a dinner reservation via Open Table" (that recipe looks at my Gmail, the others directly connect to Twitter, Instagram, Pinboard, etc). All those kinds of things are automated. Then I use an Android app called SMS Backup to insert a log of all phone calls I made... the person I called or received a call from. Those are automated too. I don't actually put everything into Google Calendar though. I only put things that I regard as public. So messages I've sent via Signal, or watching a film at home with my wife or having friends over... those things are private and didn't end up in any calendar. What I'm going for is: If the metadata is out in the world somewhere, then it should serve me more than it serves anyone else. I copy that metadata back into Google Calendar and the way it serves me is that I can always view everything I've done publicly in a wider context: Tweeted that, bookmarked this, purchased that book on Wordy. I get to glue together information from several systems and that is the essence of the diary, I get to see stories of my life in my own metadata. Final note: It's a delicate system. I've been doing it for years and it needs love to maintain all of the integrations. A few I've abandoned along the way (I used to record the audio of phonecalls, upload to Drive, and link from the Google Calendar event... but this was fragile, and the voice wasn't indexed or searchable so could never answer questions like "When did I call x about y?"... the metadata of who I called was enough, so I abandoned the sound). Hope all that helps. And I'm afraid I don't have much code to show for this. Things I'm missing: Google Fit and Google Maps Timeline integrations. If any Google Calendar team member wants to hear more, I have a lot of views on what could be done with Calendar to make it a really awesome tool for a "plan this, log that" diary that helps create and tell stories of our lives. I'm in SF next month and can meet if you want. Contact details in my profile.
- cgb_ 11y ago
id122015 11y ago
Quote "It is a time based database of my life" Exactly that's the reason I want to drop all Google products. Until now I found an alternative to Gmail. Google Reader went bust and I live happily without it. Google Calendar is the last bit I need to find an alternative for. I thought that all you hackers here are more independent than me. Why don't you create your own local "Google Calendar"? no one will judge you for the quality.
- afarrell 11y ago
  > Why don't you create your own local "Google Calendar"? 1) Because it would take months. 2) Because it would probably be hard to make it integrate with other things like Calendly.
  - wjoe 11y ago
    There are already various servers you can set up at home or on a personal server based on CardDAV, which is an open standard for exactly this purpose. I set one up for myself in a day, and I can easily access it on my phone and, from a web UI, on my computers, in my email client, etc. It's fairly widely supported and you can use it with various calendar apps and programs, but unfortunately the standard is a bit awkward and it's still not as widely supported as things like Google Calendar.
  - JoBrad 11y ago
    Also, to be as effective as Google Calendar, you'd have to end up integrating it with as many external sources as Google Calendar, decreasing any privacy you might have gained by making your own product.
- joseluis 11y ago
  If you don't mind sharing, what is the alternative you found to Gmail? I couldn't find any satisfying.
- buro9 11y ago
  Everything in my Google Calendar is already out there somewhere. Nothing private is in it. All I'm doing is making all of that data useful to me. It's not anything that isn't already available to someone or everyone. I compartmentalise public and private, but don't consider things that create metadata elsewhere on the internet to be private. Anything public, is in my calendar. Also... > Why don't you create your own local "Google Calendar"? no one will judge you for the quality. Time is hard. Places are hard. Being able to describe an event that is "Flight BA0285 from LHR to SFO" involves a single event over a duration of time, that crosses time zones, and maybe daylight savings, whilst changing places. And further knowing that BA0285 is a flight number and then informing you of delays. This stuff is way harder than it initially looks, and makes me really appreciate just how right Google got this.
nailer 11y ago
I just wish they fixed scheduling. If it's 12:10 AM, and I set an alarm for 8 tomorrow in Google Now, I want it for the morning, not 32 hours time. Compare with Siri, which actually asks you explicitly.
- buro9 11y ago
  I noticed that too... I get around it by using "set alarm for 7 hours and 50 minutes" instead. Awkward, but works.
- boterock 11y ago
  if you skip saying "tomorrow" it will wake you up the same morning
- ntpeters 11y ago
  It works if you simply add "AM" or "PM" when you say the time.
- SloopJon 11y ago
  I was really annoyed when a meeting I scheduled for 2:00 every Friday changed to 1:00 after falling back from DST to standard time. Google's helpful explanation: "Google Calendar uses Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) to help avoid issues with daylight savings time."
erikb 11y ago
You mean you search past events via search box. Never did that. I love great search boxes, but for some reason I always did that manually in Calendar without even thinking about it.
deepGem 11y ago
Glad am not the only one who faces this problem. Search on Google calendar is terrible. What I'd love is a Apple timeline like interface that is searchable by natural language. Wishful thinking :)
zirni 11y ago
Hi buro9, I'm also using google calendar heavily for my daily live. I usually use it to plan and keep track of my goals/habits too. I really like the idea to have appointments, goals/habits, events, shared calendars for work, family etc. and see my life and my time in one place. I've wrote a little web app which helps me to keep on track with my habits. You can define a spec for a habit like 'play the guitar each day' or 'sports 3 times a week' and it connects to my google calendar and looks if my current weeks past and planned events match the habit specs. It's very powerfull. Overall I'll automate everything I can in my google calendar with recurring events to have the bare minimum of effort managing it. If you're interested check it out https://www.time-mentor.com/ https://www.time-mentor.com/ Thanks :-)

by buro9 11y ago

reitanqild 11y ago

You tried reporting it? I hate reporting things to them because their feedback seems tuned to discourage that behaviour, but between that and complaining here I have seen major improvements.

kinkora 11y ago
There is this constant pet peeve of mine with the Google Calendar App on Android where if you would like to delete an appointment, you can't do it anywhere else (week, month, day, etc) except in the appointment itself. Prior to Lollipop, one had to go into the appointment itself -> hit "edit" -> scroll all the way down to the bottom of the appointment details -> click giant delete button which filled the whole bottom bit. Lollipop is slightly better where you still have to click on the appointment itself but again, there are no obvious buttons except edit and the only way to delete it is to click on "menu" -> select delete. I tried reporting it and like any other support query that goes to google, it just goes into a giant black hole (ok, i exaggerate much.. more like 7 in 10 actually).
- ikeboy 11y ago
  I wish there was a fast way to cancel all appointments for some period of time.

rawnlq 11y ago

It's actually just incredibly dumb UI. You see the little calendar on the left hand side? Click the date there to choose the "from" date for filtering the search. Completely unintuitive and undiscoverable IMO and only found out about it when googling the issue.

buro9 11y ago

Someone asked about how I do this stuff, and I guess why... I replied privately but the answer can be public: It's part manual, part-automated. I manually add travel itinerary items, tickets (for sports, shows, concerts), etc... at the time of purchase, with enough information such that I could arrive somewhere and that calendar entry can tell me everything... i.e. I even attach PDF tickets to calendar entries. I don't trust the automated Gmail stuff for this as I want to be sure it really got every important detail right. Then there's some IFTTT automation. These are things like "If I make a public Tweet" or "If I post to Instagram" or "If I bookmark something on Pinboard" or "If I make a dinner reservation via Open Table" (that recipe looks at my Gmail, the others directly connect to Twitter, Instagram, Pinboard, etc). All those kinds of things are automated. Then I use an Android app called SMS Backup to insert a log of all phone calls I made... the person I called or received a call from. Those are automated too. I don't actually put everything into Google Calendar though. I only put things that I regard as public. So messages I've sent via Signal, or watching a film at home with my wife or having friends over... those things are private and didn't end up in any calendar. What I'm going for is: If the metadata is out in the world somewhere, then it should serve me more than it serves anyone else. I copy that metadata back into Google Calendar and the way it serves me is that I can always view everything I've done publicly in a wider context: Tweeted that, bookmarked this, purchased that book on Wordy. I get to glue together information from several systems and that is the essence of the diary, I get to see stories of my life in my own metadata. Final note: It's a delicate system. I've been doing it for years and it needs love to maintain all of the integrations. A few I've abandoned along the way (I used to record the audio of phonecalls, upload to Drive, and link from the Google Calendar event... but this was fragile, and the voice wasn't indexed or searchable so could never answer questions like "When did I call x about y?"... the metadata of who I called was enough, so I abandoned the sound). Hope all that helps. And I'm afraid I don't have much code to show for this. Things I'm missing: Google Fit and Google Maps Timeline integrations. If any Google Calendar team member wants to hear more, I have a lot of views on what could be done with Calendar to make it a really awesome tool for a "plan this, log that" diary that helps create and tell stories of our lives. I'm in SF next month and can meet if you want. Contact details in my profile.

cgb_ 11y ago

id122015 11y ago

Quote "It is a time based database of my life" Exactly that's the reason I want to drop all Google products. Until now I found an alternative to Gmail. Google Reader went bust and I live happily without it. Google Calendar is the last bit I need to find an alternative for. I thought that all you hackers here are more independent than me. Why don't you create your own local "Google Calendar"? no one will judge you for the quality.

afarrell 11y ago
> Why don't you create your own local "Google Calendar"? 1) Because it would take months. 2) Because it would probably be hard to make it integrate with other things like Calendly.
- wjoe 11y ago
  There are already various servers you can set up at home or on a personal server based on CardDAV, which is an open standard for exactly this purpose. I set one up for myself in a day, and I can easily access it on my phone and, from a web UI, on my computers, in my email client, etc. It's fairly widely supported and you can use it with various calendar apps and programs, but unfortunately the standard is a bit awkward and it's still not as widely supported as things like Google Calendar.
- JoBrad 11y ago
  Also, to be as effective as Google Calendar, you'd have to end up integrating it with as many external sources as Google Calendar, decreasing any privacy you might have gained by making your own product.
joseluis 11y ago
If you don't mind sharing, what is the alternative you found to Gmail? I couldn't find any satisfying.
buro9 11y ago
Everything in my Google Calendar is already out there somewhere. Nothing private is in it. All I'm doing is making all of that data useful to me. It's not anything that isn't already available to someone or everyone. I compartmentalise public and private, but don't consider things that create metadata elsewhere on the internet to be private. Anything public, is in my calendar. Also... > Why don't you create your own local "Google Calendar"? no one will judge you for the quality. Time is hard. Places are hard. Being able to describe an event that is "Flight BA0285 from LHR to SFO" involves a single event over a duration of time, that crosses time zones, and maybe daylight savings, whilst changing places. And further knowing that BA0285 is a flight number and then informing you of delays. This stuff is way harder than it initially looks, and makes me really appreciate just how right Google got this.

nailer 11y ago

I just wish they fixed scheduling. If it's 12:10 AM, and I set an alarm for 8 tomorrow in Google Now, I want it for the morning, not 32 hours time. Compare with Siri, which actually asks you explicitly.

buro9 11y ago
I noticed that too... I get around it by using "set alarm for 7 hours and 50 minutes" instead. Awkward, but works.
boterock 11y ago
if you skip saying "tomorrow" it will wake you up the same morning
ntpeters 11y ago
It works if you simply add "AM" or "PM" when you say the time.
SloopJon 11y ago
I was really annoyed when a meeting I scheduled for 2:00 every Friday changed to 1:00 after falling back from DST to standard time. Google's helpful explanation: "Google Calendar uses Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) to help avoid issues with daylight savings time."

erikb 11y ago

You mean you search past events via search box. Never did that. I love great search boxes, but for some reason I always did that manually in Calendar without even thinking about it.

deepGem 11y ago

Glad am not the only one who faces this problem. Search on Google calendar is terrible. What I'd love is a Apple timeline like interface that is searchable by natural language. Wishful thinking :)

zirni 11y ago

Hi buro9, I'm also using google calendar heavily for my daily live. I usually use it to plan and keep track of my goals/habits too. I really like the idea to have appointments, goals/habits, events, shared calendars for work, family etc. and see my life and my time in one place. I've wrote a little web app which helps me to keep on track with my habits. You can define a spec for a habit like 'play the guitar each day' or 'sports 3 times a week' and it connects to my google calendar and looks if my current weeks past and planned events match the habit specs. It's very powerfull. Overall I'll automate everything I can in my google calendar with recurring events to have the bare minimum of effort managing it. If you're interested check it out https://www.time-mentor.com/ https://www.time-mentor.com/ Thanks :-)