I tried searching for one specific character to mass delete spam, "₹" (quoted in the literal query), and the search returned a few matches and then the rest were extremely obviously not remotely matches.
Why has a search company compromised a flagship product's ability to search?
Has anyone developed a workaround so that they can actually search their inbox and act on the results? Should I download Thunderbird or something?
Google was a search company, many years ago.
Today's Google is an advertising company that just happens to have a legacy search division.
The same can be said for almost everything they make.
As an extension, what we're seeing with OpenAi et al. is that they are capturing that attention and taking search with them. And so (as I referred to a couple comments down) OpenAI and the others are in the Google pre-2006 moment where the products are highly successfully engaging and grabbing our attention, but they haven't quite found the business model that prints money in the way Google Ads do.
So we'll see. What do you think?
https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=33707
Somehow this website is not what it used to be.
It was an answer to the OP’s question about why Gmail search feels broken, and a nod to the previous comment pointing out Google’s core business is selling ads. In that context, Gmail isn’t optimized for superior search. It’s part of a data funnel that enables keyword targeting, ad placement, and behavioral profiling.
For me, there’s a deeper product lesson here, but also a signal about how someone thinks. Whether a candidate answers “ads” or “search” or “email” isn’t what really matters. It’s the why behind the answer that matters most.
At the end of the day, business models directly shape product decisions. That tension is something every product manager has to navigate because they sit between the business and technical sides of a company. Being able to see and articulate that tradeoff, especially when user needs diverge from monetization incentives, is key to both building effectively and being a successful product manager.
More often the business model, like subscriptions, is more tightly connected to the product. User has X problem that product Y solves and the company receives Z dollars in exchange for access. However, there are many examples where the pricing or monetization strategy is not so clearly connected to the feature set, of which google search is a great example.
For the record, I don't ask this question to junior PMs.
However, you highlight the real problem with ad-supported tech. It creates perverse incentives that makes the world an objectively worse place for most just to sell another ad. It justifies actions and data collection that would be illegal if it were anything other than a large corporation peforming that activity. At some point in history the words, "just trying to make my quarterly numbers", will be looked at with the same level of horror and shame as a similar phrase was over 75 years ago.
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.
If I know what channel the video I'm looking for is from, I end up going directly to the channel and searching from there.
Otherwise I've definitely resorted to using my history as well.
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'm happy it works for you, but it consistently doesn't for me.
The reason feels obvious: they're handling exabytes of email and building a full search index just for me is expensive. They cut serious corners.
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 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.
Without that reputation data, you have to fall back to the style of searching we did in the 90s: using operators like AND or NOT, negation (Eg "Star Wars -jedi" for information about the missile defense program).
I'm not a Google fan but their search is good in the sense it accurately and quickly returns your results.
Curious if the poor search performance you saw is related to the non-Roman alphabet search or another factor.
It's miles ahead of Outlook from my point of view.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How bad I find the search in Outlook and Teams is one of the reasons I refuse to trust Bing. I know they are completely separate divisions, but still…
Both they and gmail have trouble finding someple words and sentence fragments that I know are in there and, worse, instead of just saying they can't find it they often return a bunch of useless stuff just-in-case I meant that instead.
I keep thinking of writing an IMAP->SQL interface¹ so I can search more manually that way. Or even just mapping to files in a filesystem² so I can find/grep/etc, though the DB option would also allow some more complex searches (search for X in messages that are replies to messages containing Y, for example).
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[1] Keeping mail on the mail server, but syncing it with a DB. This is more complicated than it would first sound as it will mean decoding MIME and various sub-encodings to extract the plain text so I can properly query it, hence that project is still on my “when hell freezes over so I have enough free time” list.
[2] Yeah, maildir and similar storage formats already do this, but there is still the unpacking/decoding issue before being able to directly search the text of many messages.
I wonder if you are referring to the online version of Outlook which is awful. And agreed regarding Teams…!
For clarity It’s the desktop imap version of Outlook with a local downloaded db that searches so well for us.
This is really only the latest example of nearly useless search results.
I genuinely don't understand how in terms of both latency and accuracy, Google is failing at this embarrassingly parallel problem. Fuzzy searching I'd understand, but not searches for specific strings.
In 2025!
[1]https://lwn.net/Articles/837960/
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.