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Google Drive. I have no idea how a company with a search background produced software where it is impossible to find something.
by djinnandtonic 6y ago
Google Drive.
I have no idea how a company with a search background produced software where it is impossible to find something.
- bribri 6y agoIt’s really hard to search by file extension...
- phenkdo 6y agoAlmost the entire G Suite (sheets, docs, slides) - except probably for gmail -sucks.
- tootie 6y agoEveryone one of these cloud storage services (Dropbox, Box, Drive, iCloud, S3, OneDrive) has adopted the same mental model of file storage that computer systems from the 80s devised to mimic filing cabinets. Namely: folders. I think a folder hierarchy has some value but they should really all be using a tagging system instead. Orgs tend to have multiple hierarchies based or org charts, projects, disciplines, timelines. Being able to tag documents across all or multiple would make browsing to the right document less of a maze. And make search more accurate.
- ivan_gammel 6y agoTagging is hard from UX perspective, this is why it does not exist yet. Tagging system is at the core of Windows Vista failure, the promise on which Microsoft has never delivered.
- omosubi 6y agoI hate the tagging ux in gmail. I would consider it in Google drive but I doubt I'd like it there either
- nikisweeting 6y agoI love tagging in Gmail, I use it extensively along with the important/not-important and all the different colored stars. It's allowed me to almost completely automate my email processing by bucketing everything into colored tags with auto-filters.
- techslave 6y agogoogle drive isn’t hierarchical and the folders are just a decoration
- thombles 6y ago> iCloud Don't forget that Finder has customisable tags which sync perfectly across iCloud. They are a top-level browsing option on the iOS Files app. Probably you were thinking of something more tag-first but it does exist. :) Personally I really like the file/folder model because I can sync the whole caboodle to my hard drive, copy it to a USB backup, possibly transfer it to another operating system, knowing that I've captured the whole story.
- nikisweeting 6y agoExcept iCloud Drive file sync engine itself is not reliable, I lost so many edits and files in iCloud drive that I had to stop using it entirely and go back to rsync.
- ForHackernews 6y agoS3 is a flat object store. It has no concept of folders or hierarchy.
- Rapzid 6y agoIt has a prefix index so it does indeed have the concept of hierarchy.
- ForHackernews 6y agoOnly if you think that prefix-matching implies hierarchy. Are `invoice_2020_10_1.pdf` and `invoice_2020_11_1.pdf` children of their parent in the hierarchy, `invoice_2020_1`?
- philipwhiuk 6y agoThis reminds me of the cancelled WinFS project.
- johnwalkr 6y agoYou used to be able to put files and folders in multiple places in google drive. It was either removed or made a more obscure feature because I can’t find it now. I suspect it’s too confusing to maintain long-term, leading to what appears to be buggy behavior. I handle this by making a google sheet for a project with links to the main files, many of which inevitably are cross-referenced to other projects or standards. It works well enough, and has a killer feature: if you move or rename a file, which I do all the time if documentation is refactored, the link doesn’t break!
- rkda 6y agoSelecting the file and using Shift + Z should do the trick. Though it's been a while since I did this. It's really annoying how you can't easily make copies of directories anymore. They just create "Shortcuts" instead which act like symlinks. People though they were copies though and damn did we have a lot of accidentally deleted files these past few weeks. Also, their file recovery UX sucks.
- jacekm 6y agoIt took me years to realise that GDrive searches by file content by default instead of file name and that I need to prefix my search term with 'title:' to be able to find what I want. Now I just use their API to list all files in the terminal and then I just pipe it to `grep`. This way I can search using regular expressions.
- vlahmot 6y agoYou probably just saved me a good 15min/week! Never knew you could toss “title:” in there. Thank you!
- remus 6y agotype: is another handy one if you know you're looking for a specific file type.
- wasyl 6y ago`source:domain` is also useful for organisations, when you want to search not only files that you've opened, but everything public or visible to you in the entire org (or at least that was the case ~a year ago)
- zwayhowder 6y agoTIL. Thank you!
- itskwanyall 6y agoSame for me, I only realised about 5 seconds ago
- philipwhiuk 6y agowat
- joubert 6y agotry cloudsearch.google.com It encompasses Drive, Mail, Calendar, etc.
- crazygringo 6y agoCurious why? I rely almost exclusively on search within Drive and it works pretty flawlessly. What's the use case for you that's failing?
- djinnandtonic 6y agoI recognize this is totally anecdotal, but about three times a week I have to ping the team asking "where is this doc that I know exists, but can't find?" Usually I'm searching by filename or for keywords that should be in text. I believe it's an issue with how documents are ordered in folders; Some documents (in personal folders?) never come up in search, etc.