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Comment by Waterluvian

4 years ago

This is why I love love love Gmail and Google Photos. The search engine is so powerful.

I search "driveway" and get all the photos my wife and I ever took that shows our driveway. Ah yes the cracks are getting worse.

I search email for "driveway repair" and find that old recommendation from a friend despite the word driveway having never been mentioned.

I don't need a sorting system. I need a big pile of all my data ever with a fantastic search engine.

I'd prefer if it wasn't google.

Search is awesome. I agree, gmail's is great. Apple's Spotlight is also fabulous. So why does the article say "search doesn't fix this?"

The problem is when search extends across domains. I can search files with Spotlight, but not my google emails. On my phone, it's worse because there are so many different comms systems. I can search my Whatsapp messages; my SMS messages; my email; Facebook messenger; Skype.... Each individual search is fine, but no one tool does them all. Hence, the idea of using manual labels to classify stuff - including emails - can still be useful. Crazy that we're forced back to this.

  • (I'm the eponymous 'Johnny'.)

    Yep, search is great in Google-world or on your Mac. But try it at work where everything is in disparate SharePoints if you're lucky.

    > Hence, the idea of using manual labels to classify stuff - including emails - can still be useful. Crazy that we're forced back to this.

    I know!

  • Couldn’t agree with this more. Local folder organisation isn’t the problem, silo’d data in proprietary ecosystems is.

    • There is a product who's name I cannot remember that indexes all your stuff (local, cloud) to make it all searchable - it's not Google but your index is in their system.

      Edit: Seva and Cloudtenna

      I wish I had a local one that just packed it all into Solr