Google mail isn't any better.

You would think that the world-renound search team would be able to find an email from my boss last month, but I guess not.

— Andy Hallberg (@Andrew_Hallberg) October 24, 2019

Search in email must be much, much harder than I realize, because neither Microsoft nor Google can seem to get it right, or even have it work half-decently. And it’s not just email. In Windows even the Start Menu search for the default items doesn’t work half the time, including on a fresh default install.

How this level of failure is possible, I don’t know. I’ve been using Outlook since 1997 and search has never worked correctly and I guess it never will. I’ve not used gmail since 2005, but search didn’t function then and it appears to still not be adequate for many people.

So, why is search so hard when there is known, predictable access to all the data? Do not enough users depend on it, so no one cares? Or is it just far harder than I suspect? I doubt the latter because I think I could throw together a simple guaranteed functional keyword search in PowerShell in few days over known data, and I am a crap programmer.