Ask HN: when is Google Instant coming to my GMail search? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: when is Google Instant coming to my GMail search?

31 pointsjfi24 comments

Show me my matching mails real time a la Google Instant. This would be very useful.

Google Instant will most likely never come to GMail search. The speed at which GMail queries are returned simply aren't fast enough for real-time search, and it's unlikely Google has a monetary incentive to improve the speed to this level. Remember, GMail search is a feature; Google Search is a business.

There are a few reasons GMail search is slow:

* GMail searches must search a genuinely real-time index of your e-mails. An e-mail must be searchable the instant it's created. Web search has an inherent latency which allows Google to do offline processing to improve search speed.

* It follows that, GMail must be an exact match, while Web search is an approximation.

* Popular queries can't be cached and returned quickly.

Source: http://www.quora.com/Why-does-Gmail-take-longer-to-search-my...

Would you accept an approximation for results as you type, with the true, exact search happening when you stop typing? I think this would be very useful, especially since I don't need to search the absolute real-time index of my emails 99% of the time. It would probably confuse users, though- having a new result pop in .5 seconds later.

"GMail searches must search a genuinely real-time index of your e-mails. An e-mail must be searchable the instant it's created." That's not a significant difference in terms of searching. The index segmentation is not likely to have a significant impact for most queries, and the segments are likely combined often enough for it not to be a problem.

It is real difference is that the infrastructure to support searching your one little inbox index just isn't there. It's probably not constantly loaded into RAM. It does cache queries though, try, "red" then "green" then "red".

Another difference is that is shows well more than 10 results.

But then, the amount of data that you search in gmail is a drop in the ocean compared to web search.

Gmail doesn't even have substring search (e.g. searching for "hack" will not find instances of "hacker"). I think that would be a prerequisite for Instant-style searching.

No it wouldn't, instant search doesn't search substrings, but strings it thinks you are about to type in.

You could create a lookup table of those for each GMail account in the background even if you didn't have substring search.

True. But it's worth noting that those predictions are sufficient for a slow, partially-working substring search. Gmail could search for the n most likely completions of your query terms in addition to the normal search, and collate the results.

I don't know about you, but I find that Gmail searches take quite a bit longer to process than web searches because they can't be cached and they cannot have any latency. Sometimes it takes multiple seconds just to process a seemingly-simple search of my mail.

How would they be able to really quickly (instantly) perform accurate and up-to-date searches of mail if a single query can take multiple seconds in its current state?

What is more, I actually find annoying the lame state of search in Gmail, given their all-mighty web counter part. Pretty slow, in general. No caches. No query expansions. No query suggestions. No nothing more than simple operators (and, or, in:, label:, after:, before:, and others I don't remember) and thats all.

Suggest a feature for Gmail: http://mail.google.com/support/bin/static.py?page=suggestion...

To suggest Google Instant, scroll down to the bottom, and under "I have another idea", select: Interface and settings > Gmail interface > Search options. I've just suggested "Google Instant mail search".

(I assume you can just suggest under Other, but I think Search options makes the most sense.)

I wrote a Windows application which reads in all your email files and creates an SQL database/index, along with a Lucene index for searching the email body.

You can do an SQL wildcard search like SELECT * from mymail where SUBJECT like "%Gmail%", and the results are more-or-less instant.

I use it all the time for my own purposes, but nobody wants to beta test it.

I would settle for GMail to be usable again, let alone improved. As of right now, I can't send or reply to any email's from any account[1], I can't search within my emails, I can't view emails that aren't on the front page anymore or are archived, etc.

Its not a matter of it being slow; its a matter of clicking a button before lunch, and the page still not being loaded when I sit down again afterwards[1]. And it happens on three different accounts; one @gmail, one free Apps and one paid Apps.

1. Wired connection, its not timing out or anything like that.

Really? My Google Apps email has 57930 emails in it and if I search for something, I can usually get the results back in 3-4 seconds.

Cloudmagic does just that! I've been using it for about a week, works really well.

Here's the link: http://www.cloudmagic.com/

no linux support :(

http://www.greplin.com is better if you trust them.

How is greplin better than CloudMagic?

came here to post that. been using it for a few weeks now on my mac. very satisfied.

Been using it on both my office & personal account. Incredible! Considering that I spend most of time in inboxes, it has already saved myriad hours of mine on searches.

It also intrigues me that these guys launched it even before Google Instant. It rocks!

How would anyone here have any idea?

I was thinking the same when I saw this question posted on the main HN page. I guess it could have been worded differently and not be an ASK HN When ?

Shoulda been 'Ask HN Googlers', and the answer'd be 'no comment' either way.

Good chance to get a job at google. Be quick!

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