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I actually heard that it's quite costly to index emails for gmail (not from a gmail source, just random web chatter). It makese sense. Most emails are not impor
by ramoq 17y ago
I actually heard that it's quite costly to index emails for gmail (not from a gmail source, just random web chatter). It makese sense. Most emails are not important, they are just huge amounts of random chatter. I'd imagine indexing emails (full-text) properly would require some effort. The gmail team is probably on a budget :)
But then again, if they can index the web. Why not email.
- plusbryan 17y agoI'm no expert, but reMail does it on my freakin iPhone - I'm guessing they could do even better on a cluster...
- ramoq 17y agoAgreed, Google could probably do it better. But imagine maintaining separate indexes for each and every gmail acct and constantly updating those indexes. reMail used to do something similar to that.
- metachor 17y agoWell, they already do (and have to) maintain separate indexes for each and every gmail account (or else how would you search on the metadata fields like To: and From: in your inbox at all?). Supposedly the issue is that they don't perform more computationally-expensive linguistic analysis during the indexing phase. If they tokenize each word but don't perform any stemming or lemmatization, for example, the result would be similar: only full-word non-substring matching. As others have pointed out, its probably a cost-benefit decision by Google to not spare grid cycles on full-fledged linguistic analysis for individual's email accounts. Google CAN do better at it, as is evidenced by their web search index.