[ucm_edge]

I'm stuck on Notion since my much older CTO thinks Notion is 'hip'. I think it's more fair to say Notion is just the counter culture solution to the same problem O365 and G-Suite try to solve. I suppose Notion kind of made sense back when were tiny, but these days Notion is just clunky and has one of the worst search functions I have ever had the displeasure of using.

At least it apparently isn't doing well in our security audit and the security team is telling us G-Suite is in our future.

[freedomben]

I haven't used Notion much but if the search is worse than G-Suite, that is bad indeed. G-Suite search is so bad I sometimes wonder if I'm being trolled. Google is supposed to be king of search, yet I can type in one of the words in the title of a document that I was editing a few days ago, and it won't find it, but it will find some obscure and completely unrelated string in a csv file from 2014 that I haven't opened since I uploaded it. To work around the horrible search, I literally keep a google doc that starts with AAAAA so it will always be at the top that has a bunch of links and keywords in it. When I need to find a document or spreadsheet or whatever in google drive, I Ctrl+F in there and it's a life saver. Also seems ridiculous that I have to keep my own index file in order to find anything.

[unmole]

Try cloudsearch.google.com. It works much much better than the GSuite search.

[eatonphil]

That's pretty nifty, thank you!

[exikyut]

(But isn't available for G Suite Legacy, for anyone idly curious.)

[pimeys]

Don't even get me started about problems in Notion. It is so depressingly bad that it makes me hate one thing I really like about my work: writing. The search is just broken, but even more broken is the user interface for writing. All kinds of weird things happen if you click your text or start a code block and move your cursor to the wrong way.

What I do nowadays is I iterate my texts in Org Mode, get the comments on GitHub and when we're all happy about the text, I import it to Notion and lose the writing to the black hole of Notion search forever. Now when they have a public API, I'm thinking could there be an Emacs plugin that could sync the text between Notion and Org Mode, that would let me keep my texts in version control? I guess that's just a matter of time...

[kstrauser]

I’m there with you on the search function. I have no idea what its result ranking algorithm is, but I’d love it if the top results were ones with the exact search string. Instead, we get “You searched for AWS. OK! Here are pages with awl, Australia, House, lasagna, [8 pages], Google Wave, and AWS.”

[walljm]

I feel like Notion and GSuite (Docs mainly) solve two very different problems.

The thing that Notion brings (which I found hard to work with in Gsuite) was that shared documents aren't owned by any one individual, and copies are far less likely to proliferate. So its good for shared documentation that an Organization needs, as opposed to two people collaborating on a document, which google docs handles fine.

The basic tables and cards and stuff are nice for many things but are not a substitute for sheets by any stretch of the imagination. And Notion has no analog for Slides.

[Schroedingersat]

I can't imagine search worse than teams (which often fails on the literal exact text from earlier that day). I'm so sorry.