Gmail search woes
I like Gmail. I like the filter options, spam protection, labels, interface, speed and labs features. But there's always been one area where it lets itself down, and it's not what you'd expect.
The Gmail message search function SUCKS! Whilst it can do some useful stuff, for example I can use the "in:" operator to specify which label I want to search within, it still fails when given some basic search terms.
First of all, you can't do partial searches. Go to Google.com, and search for "face". Facebook.com is the first result. How come when I search for "face" in Gmail none of my Facebook messages are returned? OK sure, if I was looking for messages about Facebook, I wouldn't search for "face", but what if I was searching for messages about podcasts? Searching "podcast" won't bring back any messages featuring "podcasts".
Now, in any decent search engine you could just use a wildcard! Yay! Except "podcast*" returns the same results as "podcast". Gmail search doesn't have a wildcard feature.
What's most surprising about all of this is that Gmail IS Google! Y'know, only the biggest search engine - by a huge margin! How can it be this bad? I've searched the web (using Google - of course) and I can't find any substitue for using an asterisk for a wildcard - making partial searches a complete no-no.
And one other thing - why do Google feel the need to have a seperate box for quick contact searching? Couldn't this functionality just be moved the main search box?
Rant over.
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