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?
Don’t trust it for other functions in Gmail reliably though. Or Calendar. Bad
Google was a search company, many years ago.
Today's Google is an advertising company that just happens to have a legacy search division.
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
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.
Curious if the poor search performance you saw is related to the non-Roman alphabet search or another factor.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
[1]https://lwn.net/Articles/837960/