I've never had a problem with Gmail search and I'm surprised the article writes about 20+ second search times as if it's a common and widespread issue.
I have around 45,000 messages in my Gmail inbox. My experience searching it has felt sluggish for a long time. But really the fatal flaw is that search terms have to be damn near exact. Gmail is a joke compared to Google when it comes to fuzzy searches. I often find myself having to do several searches to get what I want, compounding the issue of search latency. It's so bad I sometimes give up entirely.
Ouch. If you're anything like me, around 90% of your traffic comes from mailing lists. Greplin could win big by inferring what mailing lists you are on (along with beginning and ending subscription dates) in order to factor out all relevant storage and indexing.
Sometimes it's just easier to search for things in Gmail. But since it is just a mailing list, it's pretty easy to label it and kill it en masse if you need to. At least, that's what I do.
The substring search is HUGE, though. Also, if they support searching attachments, that would be great -- I haven't looked carefully to see if they do.
If I do a from:, to:, and search keyword, Gmail can often take around 20 seconds; normal keyword searches for recent items take about five seconds.
Gmail slowdowns seem to be common for older Gmail users with a ton of mail and lots of labels; Google has acknowledged the problem and claimed they're working on it, but the only people who have had fixes are ones who've complained loudly enough to get moved around to a newer server.
I appreciate your feedback. I've been on gmail since 2006 or so with lots of labels, but only ever about 500-1000 messages at any given time.
I was trying various searches today, with the from:, to: operators, as well various keywords and the longest lag I had was a little over 2 seconds. I've heard people complain about it, but never to the tune of 20 seconds. I genuinely thought it was exaggerated for effect in the FA.