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Comment by ohazi | Hacker News Reader

I've convinced myself that this happens in gmail / hangouts history search too. It'll very confidently tell you that here are the only six results for your search term going back to the beginning of time, but if you go and manually dig up something that you know is there from ten years ago, then all of a sudden there are seven results the next time you search for the same term.

I haven't done this methodically, and I can't prove that this is happening, but it's infuriating nonetheless.

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This definitely happens. I have 1 email that is about 5 years old that I reference once or twice a year, often enough that it is a suggested search term. Recently Gmail has been unable to find it and I restored to starring it. It is literally the only starred email I have but I can no longer search for it.

Has happened to me too. Actually, the Android gmail app is even worse on searching. I often have to launch a browser and search via the web interface because the app returns no results.

This is true in their iOS app as well. I've given up searching in the app and just open up the full web site when I need to find something.

My experience with the Android App is that search seems to be local only. So if the email is older than the retention policy or handled elsewhere then it's unlikely to show up there. Emails deleted on the desktop are notoriously invisible on mobile.

This is actually very worrisome for me. I use Gmail as my personal store of weird information, from Wifi passwords to the account number of that service I only use every 4 years. I Just send myself an email with obvious terms to search for in it and the relevant information. It's super convenient and I've never had it fail... yet, apparently.

I've had this for Chrome history as well. There have been multiple times where I'm sure I've browsed a site with some keyword in the title and it just doesn't show up in search. I don't tend to have a clue about the time window it would be in either so I can't go looking for it, so I can't prove it.

Chrome history may as well be useless and/or developed by the same people who created Reddit search.

I feel that it is intentionally bad so people don't realize how much Google knows about them.

Meanwhile their image recognition gets better and better. For those of you who use Google Photos backup, try a keyword image search in Google Drive sometime of your untagged photos ("beach", "face," etc.) You'll be creepily surprised on what Google is indexing, even against what they claim they don't (try some sketchier words).

I can one up that: I was living in Dubai a few years ago and have a number of photos of fancy cars I could never even dream of affording. If I search for “Lamborghini” or “Rolls Royce” it gives me the photos of those cars. I’ve never tagged them and I’m not an Android user, so they aren’t reading my messages.

https://imgur.com/caz8D2Y

I even have four photos I took at night, in burst mode, as a Bughatti Veyron zoomed passed, and yes, it can recognise those...

iOS photos app does this as well.

Samsung gallery app does this as well. You can even search for stuff like "selfie".

Maybe every photo using the front camera is a selfie?

Didn't think of that obvious solution!

It does generic terms like "cars", but it doesn't work for specific brands (at least on my 5S).

All modern gallery apps have some rudimentary photo recognition, but I haven't found any but Google's that will allow you to search terms like "topless/nude" and find accurate results. I would never store photos like that with Google, but I've confirmed it works, and with how many promotions Google has run offering free photo storage with their latest phones there are undoubtedly thousands and thousands of unwitting users who have sensitive photos not just automatically backed up in some Google server, but categorized. Just imagine if these servers were to be hacked and that information was conveniently pre-arranged for extortion.

I understand image recognition searching for generic terms like "cars", but my point is this can even recognise brands. And it only returns photos matching that brand, so it isn't replacing "Rolls Royce" with "cars" to do the search.

I guess it makes sense to do this, given that most things they do is based selling ads, I'm just surprised it is this accurate.

That's not a sneaky feature; it was the primary selling point when Google launched the new Photos product in 2015.

Where has Google claimed they don't index certain terms?

I searched for "paper" today and one of the results was a toilet :P But yes I agree, it has been getting better.

Was there toilet paper in the picture? :P

Just had a look, turns out there was haha. Guess that's why then.

Maybe, but it's also incredibly poor at the same time. When I search my photos for "dog" I get many many pictures of cats. But that's sort of understandable, since they are both 4-legged animals, right? Well, then I don't know why searching for "dog" also brings up pictures of birds I have in my google photos. It's great about 90% of the time, and the remaining 10% it's hilariously and completely wrong.

Chrome is much better than Edge in this regard. I have a website bookmarked and tagged with a very rare specific word. In edge, typing the keyword will never show up my bookmark. Instead it shows crap from around the world. Firefox and chrome do the right thing, my bookmark is the first suggestion.

I'm just glad I'm not the only one!

The address Bar in Firefox is great for this. I fire off a fraction of the searches I used to after switching.

I remember not too long ago a colleague of mine gave me address to internal monitoring system that we use. I tried to find it few minutes later in chrome omnibar by typing almost exact url i.e. page was aaa.bbb.com so I typed aaa bbb. It gave me nothing, just search suggestions. I'm guessing chrome does it on purpose. The less browser history they search in chrome and show back to you the more you'll go to google web search and that's ad money for them.

That's why I'm back on Firefox after quantum release. I hope mozilla never, ever, ever does something like this but I remember seeing something similar on nightly once. It gave you search suggestions first, that redirected you to google, with option to disable it in settings.

I think Chrome history might be limited in time. Something like 3

Something like 3 months. I forgot a word apparently.

I have experienced this and it is one of the main reasons I still keep an imap client set up. There are certain emails I need to be able to find and gmail does not find them. Claws Mail does. Personally this is a minor annoyance with personal email, but I would hope their commercial offering does not have this behaviour.

Another really interesting thing I've noticed in gmail relating to search is that the number of matches for a given search is approximate, which makes perfect sense if they're using some kind of probabilistic data structure. However, when the correct number of matching emails does become known, because you have gone to the end, the result is not cached even client side. This gives a weird effect when combined with pagination: you go back a page, and the number of matches changes to the estimate again despite the fact the actual number is now known.

Startup idea: a service that will let you search your inbox. Aka google for searching.

Seriously, this is egregious. You rely on your email provider to accurately search your inbox - some emails are important business, tax, and legal documents that are relevant for years, even decades. Or at least be fucking transparent about the fact that you are not really searching all emails. I know Gmail is a free service and in the T&C you agreed to (figuratively) sell your soul but this has huge real-life implications.

Thunderbird (and I'm guessing most of the offline, true email clients) has this built-in.

It's funny, in discussions about webmail vs local email client, people often say "why would I want a local client anymore, webmail is all I need".

Well... this is why you might want it. Your data under your control. Your choice of tools.

If you're using GMail and Google decides to turn GMail to crap, well, bad luck.

Gmail is not just a free service; g-suite costs money, and if this affects corporate email this definitely has real world implications

If it does not affect corporate email, it does not have real world implications?

Not necessarily, he didn't say "if and only if"

Apple has the opposite problem. On my version of OSX, Spotlight searches in the Finder return email results too, which increases the noise-to-signal results dramatically. You can turn it off but this requires you to enter your search term as a formula every time--there's no way to make it the default. If I want to search my email, I'll switch to the Mail program and search there. I neither want nor need to search my mail in the Finder.

> I neither want nor need to search my mail in the Finder.

Just exclude Mail from Spotlight search in Settings.

> Startup idea: a service that will let you search your inbox. Aka google for searching.

I don't mean to pick on you but picturing the perspective behind this comment is very funny and a little sad to me.

grep is almost 40 years old. It is free software, fast, and doesn't share your data with anyone. Small knowledge of the file structure of MIME enables more advanced search. This is all without mentioning desktop-based email clients.

Reading your comment, I can only picture some web-page javascript-based track-you-and-show-ads 15-employee company whom you give your email password so they can connect to another service and make high-latency queries on your behalf.

Shows how far we've come?

Firstly, that startup idea was an overt irony aimed at Google :). Secondly, my guess would be that maybe 0.001% of gmail users are familiar with command line interface and regular expressions. Not everybody is a coder and that is not necessarily bad.

This has happened to me with labels before, too. I'll do a search for all things that have a label and are in my inbox, and then archive them. I'll then go back to my inbox, and see that it missed something with that label. If I then repeat the search, I get zero results, even though it has the label, is in my inbox, and I can go back and find it. It's extremely frustrating.

100% Agreed. Gmail doesn't seem to want to find stuff that is there.

I doubt it's malicious

I doubt it meets expectations

I think it meets profits.

I find it incredible that google can profit from Gmail. (Actually I find it incredible that Google can profit at all.)

Advertising is an incredibly profitable industry.

Gmail doesn't show ads anymore.

It does in the promotions tab.

It provides a pretty good incentive to keep that Google cookie in your browser though (as well as your access to your interests, online purchase history, address book etc. etc. ad nauseam)

Gmail also drops sent mails occasionally for no apparent reason. They don't even bounce back, they simply disappear and never reach their destination.

I’ve gone back to using a local client recently, and being able to search/grep text files I know are in a dir has made me feel much less like I’m going insane / dependent upon capricious mystical forces.

Same here. Offline search in Thunderbird beats everything, particularly the quick filter feature.

Microsoft does this too. I have a massive mailbox going back 15 years and O365 doesn’t handle it well with full text search... you need to scope it to a person.

Ah this is good to know. I current run on-prem Exchange, with a view to moving to Office365, my mailbox is a super-set of all the mail I've ever had and goes back 20+ years.

My email arching ve going back more than 20 years is stored in a single .PST file, and I search it using Outlook. Never had a problem. Every 3 months I copy everything older than 2 months from Exchange Online into that .PST.

Outlook is totally different, and I agree it works perfectly.

I'm talking about OWA Search in O365. I use mostly VDI these days, so PSTs are out. It's a frustrating issue to me because OWA search is better in many ways for more recent stuff.

Also note this is an anecdotal interpretation based on my experience.

Just in case you are not aware, PST files can go horribly wrong when they get to 2GB in size.

Thank you for bringing this up. It would make my month if someone would chime in with a solution. I didn't know about this problem until very recently, and it caused some major headaches in my business.

Can confirm. Google, the search company, has lst the ability to accurately search even the data that it holds, never mind any other.

I've had this happen too. It's not just you. This has happened to me repeatedly and it is so, so frustrating.

I definitely have this exact issue with Google Calendar as well. I search for the exact wording of an event, and it doesn't show any results that are old. I then manually go back in the calendar and find it, do the search again and ta-da! it now shows up as a search result...

Sounds like they don't index the full corpus

Or there is a time bound or other resource bound that they are willing to expend under the current circumstances ( are you a free user? Paid user? Internal user? Mobile? Web? Etc )

yup. this.

Which isn't a bad thing as long as it is communicated. If Google is limiting functionality somehow, let me know if there is a pay to play to enable everything.

I like how Wolfram Alpha does it. You get a certain amount of compute time for free, and if you've got a paid subscription, you get a known amount more. It works well, and I don't mind paying a little to get a more reliable service.

Yep I have the same issue.

Hate to side with the big guys, but its a free service. Beggars can't be choosers. They probably dump indexes after a while for content older than x. Seems fairly reasonable actually.

You're paying with your data, same as with Facebook and many others. These extremely successful businesses are obviously able to make plenty of money using that data.

Maybe your data isn't worth what you think it is these days. Maybe they actively index what is recently used. It's cost benefit for them.

Then there's not much point to using Gmail. That was a huge part of the "never delete anything again" ploy.

> Then there's not much point to using Gmail.

Almost there...

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