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For me the most egregious way that Gmail is failing recently is that its search 100% sucks. It sucks in a way that's almost unimaginable. It uses fuzzy matching
by SamBam 4y ago
For me the most egregious way that Gmail is failing recently is that its search 100% sucks. It sucks in a way that's almost unimaginable. It uses fuzzy matching and single words when you use multiple terms.
I search "stock transfer" to find an email in my main mail from last week. It returns dozens of junk emails from my "updates" and "promotions" folders that just contain the words "share" ("share your recipes!") or "security" ("update your home security") or "inventory" (??).
Whatever happened to the promise of Gmail (I remember 2004) that folders and tagging were a thing of the past, that you could use the awesome power of Google to "just search" and the email you wanted would pop up? What happened to the Google that claimed to know whether your search for "bass" was for the fish or the guitar? Now it can't even tell that a search for "stock transfers" is not for "share your recipes?"
And yes, I know I can use quotes. Searching email shouldn't be something only the power users know how to do.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- lexapro 4y agoUsing quotes in search is hardly power user knowledge.
- BitwiseFool 4y agoI yearn to return to the days where search engines worked on keywords. When you could explicitly tell it what terms you were looking for. None of this "trying to guess what you really meant" stuff. I've found that all of the old 'google-fu' techniques only work incidentally. Perhaps it is because they want people to ask questions using natural language? I understand that an "answer engine" has its use cases, but that shouldn't be the end-all-be-all of what it means to query something online. I have no idea what kind of metrics lead Google towards fixating on the most generic terms of a search, but it is infuriating that Bing is moving in this direction too. It seems like even Google's competitors cannot help but follow its lead.
- placatedmayhem 4y ago> I have no idea what kind of metrics lead Google towards fixating on the most generic terms of a search Total shot in the dark, but I'm guessing that interpreting a query string more generically allows Google to serve up a broader collection of ads. There used to be an operator in search engines of yore (including Google, iirc) that specified, basically, "expand beyond exact matches" to include synonyms and such, maybe "~". Google has basically inverted that, so exact matching requires explicit input. I also find it frustrating.
- lokar 4y agoMatching query terms against content vs ads has always been separate. On the ads side there a pretty complex systems to expand the query to match more.
- calr 4y agoI’ve had the same experience. Search is unusable far too often for general keywords; I end up making a failed keyword search and then fall back to making a search based on sender address. Searching on sender address works fine but requires me to correctly recall who sent an email I’m looking for.
- theossuary 4y agoYou can also use category:primary, I add that to all my searches, gmail search is useless with out it.
- bondarchuk 4y agoIt's funny that search quality is declining in mail too, because it runs counter to the claim that the decline in quality of www search is strictly/mostly due to spam sites/adversarial SEO getting better.
- mattwad 4y agoI don't know why ,but the search results in the suggestions in the search input dropdown are way more accurate than what shows up after you actually submit it.
- SamBam 4y agoYup, absolutely. It shows that they can provide good results if they want to.