2nd-rate Search in Gmail and Google Docs?

Factual Questions
1

Do GMail and Google Docs have underpowered search functions?

GMail will find any word in any of your regular emails but will not find all words in advertising emails like the one I got today from Apple titled “iPhone 3G – Put Thousands of Apps at Your Fingertips.” Gmail finds the search term “Healthcare” in the body of that email but doesn’t find the word “Finance,” for example. It doesn’t highlight the words it finds.

In a regular (non-advertisement) email, GMail yellow-highlights its results – if you have “Turn On Highlighting” selected – but the highlighting is so faint as not to be useful. I can’t quickly scan a document and see which words are highlighted but instead must look closely at each highlighted word wondering whether or not it is actually highlighted. It is this way on all the PC’s I use.

Docs, but not Gmail, has dynamically filtered search “suggestions” that appear as the user types, just like Firefox, Chrome, and IE8 browsers, but this feature is only active for Folder names and document titles, not for their content. When your search term is something other than a Folder label or title, or a document title, there will be no listing of “suggestions” as you type, but it does find the word.

Docs will find any word or number in a document or spreadsheet but won’t highlight at all. There is no option, as in GMail, to toggle highlighting on and off.

Neither Docs nor GMail will find variants of words. If I search for “meeting” neither Docs nor GMail will find “meetings.”

I first noticed these seeming shortcomings in Docs and GMail Search after Google discontinued, or I should say deprecated, my favorite Google product, Google Notebook, back in the middle of January. (Current GNotebook users are allowed to continue but no new users will be accepted and development of the application is stopped.) In announcing the deprecation in the Official Google Notebook Blog, it was suggested users migrate their notes to other apps like GMail and Docs.

Looking around for a replacement online notetaking service, it surprised me to discover a few with much better Searches than Google Notebook. I always assume Google has superlative Search, whichever Google product the searchbox is found. The Search in Google Notebook has even fewer features than GMail or Docs – it won’t find a variant, it won’t highlight, and of course doesn’t dynamically “suggest” as you type.

Evernote, for example, a free notetaking website, will find any word instantaneously and yellow highlight (boldly) every instance and variant of it. It will find text in pictures, such as a photographed business card.

So I’m wondering why Google seems to be a little deficient in Search in their flagship products, GMail and Docs. Or am I wrong about that and maybe there are reasons for Search being the way it is in these two programs?

2

No comment on the rest of your OP, but regarding spam e-mails: Sometimes the spammers use some clever tricks to obfuscate the text in the actual source of the e-mail (even if it looks normal when you view the e-mail). Perhaps this is why the Gmail search is not finding the text in some of your spam e-mails… (Then again if this was truly an e-mail sent from Apple and not some other spam for an iPhone, I doubt they used this trick.)

3

This quote is from GMail Help:

Or this from the same page:

But as I said, the highlighting is so faint as to be almost useless.

These are serious shortcomings, I would think. Are these things just all right with the many GMail users on this message board?

By the way, the quotes above show one reason I lament the passing of Google Notebook. It has a feature that puts a “bookmarklet” icon called “Note This” up in the browser toolbar area. When you’re at a webpage, highlight what you want to note, click “Note This,” and it goes into Google Notebook as it appears on the webpage. If you don’t highlight anything but only click “Note This,” the whole webpage goes into your notebook. Fortunately, I’ve found that other webbased notebook sites have that very nice web-clipping feature as well.