Anecdotally, I remember other people complaining about this a few months ago, and Google was able to flip some kind of switch and make it "fast" again. Not sure

Anecdotally, I remember other people complaining about this a few months ago, and Google was able to flip some kind of switch and make it "fast" again. Not sure what they did, but Gmail has different scalability issues than Google because with the web it's fine if there's some latency between when a site changes its content and when Google indexes it. In fact it's expected which is one of the reasons why people put so much time into SEO. With Gmail you expect all of your data to be instantly searchable as soon as it hits your inbox. Compound that with the fact that everyone has their own private inbox which is exclusive of everyone else's and you can see where it's a hard problem to basically build you a personal Google with real time search capabilities. All that being said, I wish Google would hurry up and solve the problem!