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I've convinced myself that this happens in gmail / hangouts history search too. It'll very confidently tell you that here are the only six results for your sear
by ohazi 9y ago
I've convinced myself that this happens in gmail / hangouts history search too. It'll very confidently tell you that here are the only six results for your search term going back to the beginning of time, but if you go and manually dig up something that you know is there from ten years ago, then all of a sudden there are seven results the next time you search for the same term.
I haven't done this methodically, and I can't prove that this is happening, but it's infuriating nonetheless.
- tomc1985 9y agoSounds like they don't index the full corpus
- beamatronic 9y agoOr there is a time bound or other resource bound that they are willing to expend under the current circumstances ( are you a free user? Paid user? Internal user? Mobile? Web? Etc )
- rootw0rm 9y agoyup. this.
- pgrote 9y agoWhich isn't a bad thing as long as it is communicated. If Google is limiting functionality somehow, let me know if there is a pay to play to enable everything.
- Baeocystin 9y agoI like how Wolfram Alpha does it. You get a certain amount of compute time for free, and if you've got a paid subscription, you get a known amount more. It works well, and I don't mind paying a little to get a more reliable service.
- melloc 9y agoThis has happened to me with labels before, too. I'll do a search for all things that have a label and are in my inbox, and then archive them. I'll then go back to my inbox, and see that it missed something with that label. If I then repeat the search, I get zero results, even though it has the label, is in my inbox, and I can go back and find it. It's extremely frustrating.
- Spooky23 9y agoMicrosoft does this too. I have a massive mailbox going back 15 years and O365 doesn’t handle it well with full text search... you need to scope it to a person.
- Jaruzel 9y agoAh this is good to know. I current run on-prem Exchange, with a view to moving to Office365, my mailbox is a super-set of all the mail I've ever had and goes back 20+ years.
- Spearchucker 9y agoMy email arching ve going back more than 20 years is stored in a single .PST file, and I search it using Outlook. Never had a problem. Every 3 months I copy everything older than 2 months from Exchange Online into that .PST.
- Spooky23 9y agoOutlook is totally different, and I agree it works perfectly. I'm talking about OWA Search in O365. I use mostly VDI these days, so PSTs are out. It's a frustrating issue to me because OWA search is better in many ways for more recent stuff. Also note this is an anecdotal interpretation based on my experience.
- buckminster 9y agoJust in case you are not aware, PST files can go horribly wrong when they get to 2GB in size.
- emilfihlman 9y ago100% Agreed. Gmail doesn't seem to want to find stuff that is there.
- eli 9y agoI doubt it's malicious
- tomohawk 9y agoI doubt it meets expectations
- quickben 9y agoI think it meets profits.
- symmitchry 9y agoI find it incredible that google can profit from Gmail. (Actually I find it incredible that Google can profit at all.)
- fixermark 9y agoAdvertising is an incredibly profitable industry.
- cromwellian 9y agoGmail doesn't show ads anymore.
- cma 9y agoIt does in the promotions tab.
- confounded 9y ago
- cptskippy 9y agoThis definitely happens. I have 1 email that is about 5 years old that I reference once or twice a year, often enough that it is a suggested search term. Recently Gmail has been unable to find it and I restored to starring it. It is literally the only starred email I have but I can no longer search for it.
- naasking 9y agoHas happened to me too. Actually, the Android gmail app is even worse on searching. I often have to launch a browser and search via the web interface because the app returns no results.
- cptskippy 9y agoMy experience with the Android App is that search seems to be local only. So if the email is older than the retention policy or handled elsewhere then it's unlikely to show up there. Emails deleted on the desktop are notoriously invisible on mobile.
- rootusrootus 9y agoThis is true in their iOS app as well. I've given up searching in the app and just open up the full web site when I need to find something.
- tgb 9y agoThis is actually very worrisome for me. I use Gmail as my personal store of weird information, from Wifi passwords to the account number of that service I only use every 4 years. I Just send myself an email with obvious terms to search for in it and the relevant information. It's super convenient and I've never had it fail... yet, apparently.
- sjg007 9y agoYep I have the same issue.
- gonzo41 9y agoHate to side with the big guys, but its a free service. Beggars can't be choosers. They probably dump indexes after a while for content older than x. Seems fairly reasonable actually.
- graedus 9y agoYou're paying with your data, same as with Facebook and many others. These extremely successful businesses are obviously able to make plenty of money using that data.
- gonzo41 9y agoMaybe your data isn't worth what you think it is these days. Maybe they actively index what is recently used. It's cost benefit for them.
- batbomb 9y agoThen there's not much point to using Gmail. That was a huge part of the "never delete anything again" ploy.
- ForHackernews 9y ago> Then there's not much point to using Gmail. Almost there...
- aglionby 9y agoI've had this for Chrome history as well. There have been multiple times where I'm sure I've browsed a site with some keyword in the title and it just doesn't show up in search. I don't tend to have a clue about the time window it would be in either so I can't go looking for it, so I can't prove it.
- Puer 9y agoChrome history may as well be useless and/or developed by the same people who created Reddit search.
- jakecopp 9y agoI feel that it is intentionally bad so people don't realize how much Google knows about them.
- Puer 9y agoMeanwhile their image recognition gets better and better. For those of you who use Google Photos backup, try a keyword image search in Google Drive sometime of your untagged photos ("beach", "face," etc.) You'll be creepily surprised on what Google is indexing, even against what they claim they don't (try some sketchier words).
- fyfy18 9y agoI can one up that: I was living in Dubai a few years ago and have a number of photos of fancy cars I could never even dream of affording. If I search for “Lamborghini” or “Rolls Royce” it gives me the photos of those cars. I’ve never tagged them and I’m not an Android user, so they aren’t reading my messages. https://imgur.com/caz8D2Y https://imgur.com/caz8D2Y I even have four photos I took at night, in burst mode, as a Bughatti Veyron zoomed passed, and yes, it can recognise those...
- whatusername 9y ago
- dpwm 9y agoI have experienced this and it is one of the main reasons I still keep an imap client set up. There are certain emails I need to be able to find and gmail does not find them. Claws Mail does. Personally this is a minor annoyance with personal email, but I would hope their commercial offering does not have this behaviour. Another really interesting thing I've noticed in gmail relating to search is that the number of matches for a given search is approximate, which makes perfect sense if they're using some kind of probabilistic data structure. However, when the correct number of matching emails does become known, because you have gone to the end, the result is not cached even client side. This gives a weird effect when combined with pagination: you go back a page, and the number of matches changes to the estimate again despite the fact the actual number is now known.
- scoot 9y agoCan confirm. Google, the search company, has lst the ability to accurately search even the data that it holds, never mind any other.
- Jaruzel 9y ago> Google, the search company Google, the ads company FTFY.
- miek 9y agoThank you for bringing this up. It would make my month if someone would chime in with a solution. I didn't know about this problem until very recently, and it caused some major headaches in my business.
- aerovistae 9y agoI've had this happen too. It's not just you. This has happened to me repeatedly and it is so, so frustrating.
- confounded 9y agoI’ve gone back to using a local client recently, and being able to search/grep text files I know are in a dir has made me feel much less like I’m going insane / dependent upon capricious mystical forces.
- lucb1e 9y agoSame here. Offline search in Thunderbird beats everything, particularly the quick filter feature.
- dandare 9y agoStartup idea: a service that will let you search your inbox. Aka google for searching. Seriously, this is egregious. You rely on your email provider to accurately search your inbox - some emails are important business, tax, and legal documents that are relevant for years, even decades. Or at least be fucking transparent about the fact that you are not really searching all emails. I know Gmail is a free service and in the T&C you agreed to (figuratively) sell your soul but this has huge real-life implications.
- pmlnr 9y agoThunderbird (and I'm guessing most of the offline, true email clients) has this built-in.
- starsinspace 9y agoIt's funny, in discussions about webmail vs local email client, people often say "why would I want a local client anymore, webmail is all I need". Well... this is why you might want it. Your data under your control. Your choice of tools. If you're using GMail and Google decides to turn GMail to crap, well, bad luck.
- askvictor 9y agoGmail is not just a free service; g-suite costs money, and if this affects corporate email this definitely has real world implications
- 4c2383f5c88e911 9y agoIf it does not affect corporate email, it does not have real world implications?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- yojex 9y agoNot necessarily, he didn't say "if and only if"
- carlosperate 9y agoI definitely have this exact issue with Google Calendar as well. I search for the exact wording of an event, and it doesn't show any results that are old. I then manually go back in the calendar and find it, do the search again and ta-da! it now shows up as a search result...