Gmail search
« previous post | next post »
I've recently wrestled several times with similarly frustrating Gmail searches, for recent tickets and the like:
Impossible to put into words how useless Gmail search is. No wait, these guys did it!
— Alex Selby-Boothroyd (@alexselbyb.bsky.social) July 28, 2026 at 2:22 PM
I get the impression that these problems have multiplied since Gemini started helping out in Gmail, but I might be wrong.
Nathaniel Mishkin said,
July 28, 2026 @ 7:28 pm
+1. It's remarkably awful. Since before Gemini. It's only competition for badness in search in Amazon where when I search for an exact (and often distinctive) book title or author name I get similarly useless results. But at least in that case I can typically get good results by doing a Google search with the term site:amazon.com included and the title or author name in quotes.
Jonathan Smith said,
July 28, 2026 @ 8:27 pm
Incidentally Google Books search also broke relatively recently, as in can't find words that are right there in the current page image.
Since Google Google was cut up and fed to advertisers years ago, we're in a weird place where the chatbots, inexplicably still (largely?) ad free, are way better at finding That One Article or That One Phrase on the internet than Google… if you bully them right.
Avi Rappoport said,
July 28, 2026 @ 11:51 pm
The sorting of search results has been a problem for a while, so annoying!
Adrian Bailey said,
August 5, 2026 @ 8:26 pm
A related issue is searching for emails, phone calls and text messages from people and getting zero results because I haven't saved the sender/caller to my contacts list. So frustrating.