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Comment by lhamil64 | Hacker News Reader

The search in Google Messages on Android is completely useless too. It seems like it only searches within the past few days or something, if I try searching for something from a while back it never finds it. And they removed the feature to quickly scroll back to a date in the past, so the only way to dig up old texts is to manually scroll back in a conversation and hope you find it. It's absolutely ridiculous that the search is so bad when it's an app by Google of all companies.

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> The search in Google Messages on Android is completely useless too.

It's literally all Google products. They've just simplified and contextualized and added other things over the years such that if you're not searching for something already above the fold then it won't show up.

When I was using Gmail I had an email with important information that I needed about once a year. I knew the exact subject and who it was from but it would never show up in search. It was my only starred email so I could find it on demand.

Part of the reason I pay for Shortwave is because its basic search is so much better than Gmail's. I don't even use the LLM except for more descriptive searches, which it is also quite good at.

Thunderbird search is one of the best I've ever seen. Very granular options. Highly recommend.

I've managed to divest myself of most Google Apps. At this point I'm only using them for shared docs or calendars.

I recommend fastmail for calendars. Its pretty convenient, if you host your mail there already. CalDAV is really nice too so you can use your fancy calendar management apps, like thunderbird or outlook.

Shared docs I haven't cracked yet but I haven't needed to. But I hear nextcloud can do it. But that's a whole can of worms.

That's funny because iMessage search works quite well if you can find it buried in the interface. I have a feeling Apple themselves forgot it exists and hasn't gotten around to 'modernizing' it with AI yet.

> I have a feeling Apple themselves forgot it exists and hasn't gotten around to 'modernizing' it with AI yet.

tfw you're a big tech engineer/PM who does the right thing for your users but get blamed anyway

Even funnier is, it was obscenely bad for years, and then it made a sudden jump to “pretty darn good”. My headcanon is that someone high-up at Apple tried to search for a message, noticed how broken it was, and then assigned an entire engineering department to work on nothing else than iMessage search for two weeks.

This Reddit post suggests this happened in iOS 13 (so 2019): https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/d7wemx/underrated_ne...

Now it feels like a cheatcode, at least when it comes to verbatim searches (probably because the entire message database is now indexed, if I had to guess).

Seriously, try searching for the letter “e” and click “View All”. You will get effectively every message you’ve ever sent or received, in a single, reasonably scrollable list. For me it dates back to 2018.

I personally sent several scathing emails directly to directors about the issue. I have a long iMessage history and there was a point that just entering a single character in the search field would lock up my mac, let alone my older iPhone.

I have noticed and appreciate the change, so my headcanon is that they actually do read feedback. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

> iMessage search works quite well if you can find it buried in the interface

And as long as you only want to search all messages, not a single conversation.

Let me give an example: I know a person sent me an image in imessage about one year ago. How do I search "from:user has:attachment date:2024-07-*"?

In gmail that's easy, in discord, that's easy. Does imessage search have literally any of those filters?

Searching within one chat seems especially like it's table-stakes for any chat app's search

If you type the name of the person, it should allow you to create a filter for "Messages with: Person". It should also pop up a filter bubble for photos. From there I think you can type in some query and it should do a query on the photos via text. I don't think you can add your date filter though.

Second way would be to open that conversation view, click on the contact icon at the top of the view, which should then bring you to a details page that lists a bunch of metadata and settings about the conversation (e.g. participants, hide alerts, ...). One of the sections shows all photos from that conversation. Browse that until you find the one you care about.

I admit I was wrong in my understanding of iMessages capabilities.

I remembered its search sucking, and also it not working on all my devices, so I quit using it and regurgitated a stale criticism.

Still, the search is useless to me if I can't do it on my linux desktop (like I can with email, discord, and every other chat service I use), so I'd still say iMessage has a laughably lacking search by nature of it only working on ios/macos, when all other chat apps I use offer at least some search on ios/android/linux

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