Ask HN: Why is Gmail so incompetent at basic search?

> Why has a search company

Google was a search company, many years ago.

Today's Google is an advertising company that just happens to have a legacy search division.

idk… I for one like the fact that Gmail sucks at search to be honest because I (naively?) believe they don’t profile everything in your inbox. For example, if I subscribe to a newsletter about “healthy lifestyle,” it won’t return that newsletter, but return string matches where “healthy” or “home” are relevant. If they profiled the emails for contextual awareness to know what I meant by “healthy living,” I’d be concerned.

my answer is a question: does email make a lot of money for google?

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Gmail's search likely tokenizes/normalizes Unicode symbols like ₹ differently than plain ASCII, so try searching for "rupee" or use mail filters with regex capabilities instead.

Because Google is crap at basic search these days.

Gmail is a toy, not a real email user agent.¹ You might be happier with Mutt, which is powerful, flexible, and fast. But probably the most efficient way to accomplish what you want is to use a tool like grepmail (assuming Google provides a way to export your mail into an mbox file or something).

[1]https://lwn.net/Articles/837960/

Yep, it happened to Google Search first and slowly creeped to other products now. It's not even "AI", it's just incompetence.

Try this now, go to your inbox, filter emails by date, you will get back a list where your emails are sorted randomly ... no really, check it out. This is a new "feature". Their PMs should be shot.

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This is why it’s worth paying for email not at Google. It’s not expensive.

You could self host but that’s a nuisance I’m happy to pay someone for.

Search sucks even when using English. It fails to find emails I know have certain words in the subject.

The entire Google ecosystem is a hot dumpster fire of garbage that doesn’t help me at all at this point. It used to be amazing when they focused on organizing information rather than selling eyeballs. But all things turn to shit chasing profits.

It's still better than YouTube's search.

I once was looking for a video I watched a few months ago with a history search. Nothing brought it up.

I found it with text match in my browser history.

Out of curiosity, I tried every combination of words in its title, including the full title verbatim, and it did not show up. It is truly astonishing how bad it is.

Sorry to read that you’re dealing with this. My primary email is apart of some vast international spam program where the mail servers responsible for sending me spam forge headers, falsify source record information, lie about which downstream service provider is hosting them, etc. It’s really quite interesting, but more so than that, it’s annoying.

I pondered my problem for a few days, thinking about what sort of external service I could use to surgically remove these numerous, daily, very specifically identifiable spam emails before I stumbled on a thread on StackOverflow where some people discussed using Google App Scripts to do this very thing.

I’d recommend searching the web for that sort of topic. You’ll find that there’s a way to set up an hourly script job that will wipe this spam completely off your mailbox and find some peace.

Hope this points you in the right direction. The idea of having to use yet another Google service to fix an existing separate one is such a stupid labyrinthine experience, but at least it beats having to set up a job on a VPS for this.

If you had this issue with another mailbox service provider, a VPS approach would probably be necessary, though.

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I find Gmail search to be OK. Compared to search functions in other tools it’s probably near the top. I’m looking at you Notion…

Curious if the poor search performance you saw is related to the non-Roman alphabet search or another factor.

Finding things in Google Drive is an awful experience as well.

Typically will use Gmail in the browser for sending and recieving emails…but for searching my Gmail, it’s Outlook, ironically, which works the best.

Don’t trust Outlook for other functions in Gmail reliably though. Or Calendar. Examples are things like double emails being sent and calendar updates being missed.

At our company a lot of people use Outlook to handle their Gmail functions and it’s quite problematic…but Outlook’s search is far superior.

So I think of the browser as the main interface and only use Outlook for search.

While I was debugging this exact pain-point I prototyped a tiny web viewer that visualizes Gmail search results like a diff, highlighting every literal match. I ended up turning it into a weekend side-project powered by the same Black Forest Labs tech behind FLUX Kontext (https://flux-kontext.io/)

I've been on email since 1985 and had the same personal address since 1991. I've used about 20 or 25 email clients across a dozen OSes (counting all Linux distros as one).

Gmail has the best search of any email system I've found.

I think your problems are nothing to do with Gmail or its search, but are to do with things like Unicode character encoding, character sets and codepoint matching.

I was asking myself the same question the other day, some basic search thing just didn't work.

If you think that's bad wait til you try Outlook.

One thing people often miss: Gmail’s search isn’t broken because it’s technically hard. It’s broken because it's not a priority.

Accurate, user-respecting search doesn’t drive engagement or ad revenue. Nudging you toward the Promotions tab does. So over time, product decisions optimize for "glanceable convenience" rather than depth or control.

it’s disinterest, bordering on contempt. The infra could support proper search. But letting power users mass-delete or filter with precision is not part of the funnel.

As others have mentioned, the search and overall performance of "legacy" products like Gmail and Apple Mail are absolutely terrible, not because those companies lack the technical capacity to improve them, but because they have very little financial incentive to do so.

We’re building an IMAP-native email client:

https://marcoapp.io

All metadata is stored locally on the client, so full-text searches complete in single-digit milliseconds.

Most people have simply grown accustomed to the insanely slow search speeds of traditional IMAP clients and don’t realise how bad they are until they try something faster.

Use a desktop client like Thunderbird or Mailbird that downloads your emails locally and lets you run more reliable full-text search.

Some people also use IMAP + grep by syncing to a local folder. It’s frustrating that the world’s top search company can’t deliver consistent search in Gmail, but for now, third-party tools do a better job in edge cases like this.

> Why has a search company compromised a flagship product's ability to search?

There are two potential reasons:

1) They have a problem with the Unicode-character, which is not that uncommon with foreign-companies, that they miss some details on a local market.

2) Most search-systems have long moved to fuzzy results, with exact search being a more and more flawed option. And this goes even deeper, as they have started to expand search terms, and show you different words with the same or even just similar meaning.

And of course, there is also the solution that the search works correct, but just doesn't show you the part where this sign is, like somewhere in the header, hidden in some alternative view or an attachment, or something like that.

I think you would have much better results if you can search for a full word rather than a single character. You are treating it like a substring matches, and that’s not the job it is doing. Full text search engines handle misspellings of words or even similar phrases. Quoting like you have done would produce more favorable results, but I don’t think it works on less than a word. Is there a word or phrase you could use instead?