[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Why is Gmail so incompetent at basic search?
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       Ask HN: Why is Gmail so incompetent at basic search?
        
       I'm South Asian and my personal email reflects that, so I get spam
       from India despite never having lived there.  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?
        
       Author : sn9
       Score  : 13 points
       Date   : 2025-07-21 22:12 UTC (48 minutes ago)
        
       | pwg wrote:
       | > Why has a search company
       | 
       | Google _was_ a search company, many years ago.
       | 
       | Today's Google is an advertising company that just happens to
       | have a legacy search division.
        
         | sn9 wrote:
         | How does compromising the ability to search your inbox increase
         | ad revenue?
        
       | treyfitty wrote:
       | idk... I for one like the fact that Gmail sucks at search to be
       | honest because I (naively?) believe they don't profile everything
       | in your inbox. For example, if I subscribe to a newsletter about
       | "healthy lifestyle," it won't return that newsletter, but return
       | string matches where "healthy" or "home" are relevant. If they
       | profiled the emails for contextual awareness to know what I meant
       | by "healthy living," I'd be concerned.
        
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       (page generated 2025-07-21 23:01 UTC)