[alpaca128]

Full-text search within the average amount of a single user's emails is trivial and fast on any modern PC. Smartphones do it for autocompletion suggestions every time you type a letter. The only thing taking longer than a few milliseconds is the initial indexing.

[alias_neo]

Doesn't that assume you _have_ all of the emails on your device on order to search them?

I know for a fact, Gmail on my phone doesn't have the ~15 years of email in my account downloaded. I bet that would take significantly longer to download than the actual search would would take to perform.

If the things to be searched aren't already on the client, a client side search doesn't seem too useful to me, regardless of how much compute power you have.

[weird-eye-issue]

Yeah by default Gmail on your phone only keeps like 30 days of mail iirc

[texasbigdata]

This sort of comment is frustrating. How many times has XYZ site had broken search? It seems to _not_ be a trivial problem still.

[bellyfullofbac]

Gotta love all the comments here and on the Github issue who just throw out casual "This problem is trivial to solve!"'s.

[Dylan16807]

> This sort of comment is frustrating. How many times has XYZ site had broken search?

I can't even think of any? But also search isn't a core feature for the vast majority of sites. Something can be easy and still break if nobody cares very much.

Edit: Actually I can think of search breaking on one site that was notoriously badly run and had 0 to 1 part-time devs. That's not a flattering comparison.

Edit 2: So could the people that disagree name some notable sites with broken search? I feel like if I don't understand what "XYZ" stands for it's probably not something I should be blamed for...

[franga2000]

Not a website, but...Windows 10?? Highest market share OS, billions of $ worth of engineering time behind it and due to recent changes, search is pretty much a core feature of the OS. And I'm not even talking about file search here, which is indeed a hard-ish problem (although `locate ... | grep ...` seems to do well enough on Linux) - this is just a simple word search through a list of programs that's usually under 100 items long. And it's still broken most of the time.

Then there's MDN - a documentation site, whose 2nd most important function should be search. Yet, despite DuckDuckGo (a general-purpose search engine!) consistently finding the exact results I want, MDN's built-in search often misses even titles that are searched for verbatim.

If it weren't almost 2am and I weren't running almost entirely on caffeine, I'd probably be able to think of a few more.

[alpaca128]

Windows 10's broken search is on Microsoft.

When you can download a freeware tool that will find any file in the system instantly after maybe a minute of indexing you know the file search is not the problem here.

Just a month ago the only reason I could start a recently installed MS Office package on Windows 10 was its tendency to list newly installed programs first in the start menu. It did not show up anywhere else, could not be found by the search and Word could not even be set as default program for a file because the OS didn't seem to know of its existence.