4 ms·

Gmail still slow. Unrelated: Why haven't Google implemented a Google.com-quality-level search for email?

napoleond 12y ago
Gmail's email search is already the best in the space, by far. I'm sure there are improvements to be made, but zero external pressure to make them.
- lostlogin 12y ago
  Gmail looks particularly good after 5 mins using Apple's search in iClouds Mail.
trjordan 12y ago
The new Inbox has "Top Hits", which is a more relevance-based search for email. It seems to work quite nicely, for me. I like that it gives you a couple highly-relevant emails, and the rest are still time-sorted for combing through all results.
ColinCera 12y ago
I believe they're attacking the challenge from the opposite direction: Gmail search can be described as "okay" and Google works tirelessly to make the main Google.com search experience worse and worse -- eventually they will succeed in degrading it from its former excellence to a point where its quality matches Gmail's.
snowwrestler 12y ago
I find Gmail search to work pretty well for me. The question I have is why the Google Voice iPhone app does not have a search function AT ALL.
- kissickas 12y ago
  I believe they're phasing out the Google Voice apps (although this may not have ever been announced) in favor of more integrated solutions. Now why Hangouts are not searchable, I will never know. I could care a bit less about the colors and animation strategy Google is using, but why they don't just put a search bar at the top of every product of theirs is a mystery I'm afraid I'll have to live with for quite some time. Even the Google+ app (at least) has terrible search and takes too many clicks - I believe Facebook has actually caught up on this.
tambourine_man 12y ago
Last I checked, Gmail didn't do partial word searches. So “NewClient” won't match “GreatNewClient”. I think that's what rokhayakebe means. It's one of the reasons I only use its backend. It baffles me that a company known for search can't do it.
munificent 12y ago
When dealing with the public web, a search engine makes a single index of the web that millions of users can hit to perform searches. That amortizes the costs of generating and maintaining the index over a lot of people. Your email corpus is private and specific to you. If Google (or any other company) generated a high-quality search index for it, they'd spend a lot of CPU hours on it and only amortize that across a single user: you.

Gmail's email search is already the best in the space, by far. I'm sure there are improvements to be made, but zero external pressure to make them.

lostlogin 12y ago
Gmail looks particularly good after 5 mins using Apple's search in iClouds Mail.

trjordan 12y ago

The new Inbox has "Top Hits", which is a more relevance-based search for email. It seems to work quite nicely, for me. I like that it gives you a couple highly-relevant emails, and the rest are still time-sorted for combing through all results.

ColinCera 12y ago

I believe they're attacking the challenge from the opposite direction: Gmail search can be described as "okay" and Google works tirelessly to make the main Google.com search experience worse and worse -- eventually they will succeed in degrading it from its former excellence to a point where its quality matches Gmail's.

snowwrestler 12y ago

I find Gmail search to work pretty well for me. The question I have is why the Google Voice iPhone app does not have a search function AT ALL.

kissickas 12y ago
I believe they're phasing out the Google Voice apps (although this may not have ever been announced) in favor of more integrated solutions. Now why Hangouts are not searchable, I will never know. I could care a bit less about the colors and animation strategy Google is using, but why they don't just put a search bar at the top of every product of theirs is a mystery I'm afraid I'll have to live with for quite some time. Even the Google+ app (at least) has terrible search and takes too many clicks - I believe Facebook has actually caught up on this.

tambourine_man 12y ago

Last I checked, Gmail didn't do partial word searches. So “NewClient” won't match “GreatNewClient”. I think that's what rokhayakebe means. It's one of the reasons I only use its backend. It baffles me that a company known for search can't do it.

munificent 12y ago

When dealing with the public web, a search engine makes a single index of the web that millions of users can hit to perform searches. That amortizes the costs of generating and maintaining the index over a lot of people. Your email corpus is private and specific to you. If Google (or any other company) generated a high-quality search index for it, they'd spend a lot of CPU hours on it and only amortize that across a single user: you.