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I'm no expert, but reMail does it on my freakin iPhone - I'm guessing they could do even better on a cluster...

• ramoq 17y ago
  Agreed, 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 ago
    Well, 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.