Partial Word search problem on Gmail

Verrry frustrating

I just found out this today when I needed to find a message (among thousands) where I only knew part of the company name I wanted to find previous mail from. Seems silly that Gmail of all people don't have this feature considering the 'strength' of Gmail is supposedly search!

for as far as I know this never worked in gmail.

would like this feature too!

frustrated, would like this feature too!!!

Yep. Same problem. Ugh!

Isn't this problem fixed by the new Google Labs feature?

It is about time to fix this.

I am having the same problem. It's such a surprise coming from a company like Google, but I guess certain features were left out for some reason. They couldn't have forgotten. :)

Defaulting searches to return partial word matches might have been a significant performance hit. Maybe the wildcard solution would also be too much of a hit for their searches. But hey, it's google!

PLEASE GIVE US THE OPTION TO PARTIALLY MATCH WORDS. Wildcard characters like * are pretty common. :(

This is such an obvious difficiency that I'm sure it must be an unsurmountable problem. Partial searching is not permitted in Google search either. My guess is that in google-land, the smallest string is a "word" and that all words are indexed. When you type in a search string it just looks up each word for exact matches. A portion of a word is NOT an exact match to the indexed word. Performance is key to Google's search speed and I would wager that partial word searching would result in such a big hit to performance that Google realized the public would not tolerate it and so partial searching was omitted.

I want this capability for normal Google searches too

As tboll rightly says, partial searches in Google proper are 'somewhat' present but to allow complete partial searches would result in chaos. However, I don't think this is too much to ask for when searching a Gmail account. Obviously you'd have limits set such as a minimum of 3 or 4 characters etc.

I agree with tboll too but Google could enable this feature for advanced users. You put something (particular character) in before or after the partial word. Also, it should narrow down the searches if you include other full words in your search in addition to the partial one

I agree. This needs to be fixed. It is a particularly big problem when searching for attachments by filename (e.g. filename: hello.txt) because I can usually only remember part of the file name.

"Partial searching is not permitted in Google search either" Google uses stemming to return multiple matches, ie "Biotech" will return matches on Biotech and Biotechnology.

I think I'll set on yahoo. They are very slow (sometimes incredibly slow) but at least I can find anything I want (for instance I can fine a part of word in my notes). I've had a project to export my things in google docs but i've changed my mind. the most time loosing (more than slowness of yahoo and more stressing) is searching for e-mails in gmail with no results, when i knew that those e-mails exist! I felt stupid, because i thought I don't know to search. They even don't publicly tell us that partially word search is not possible or not desired! I have a lot of e-mails, imagine! AND today i made a mistake because I knew is somebody's birthday and I remember i put the event in the calendar. I did a search with partial word-nothing! Then i thought i forgot to carry it in calendar, i've panicked and i've wished happy birthday anyway. Wrong! Later, searching day by day :( I've discovered that the event was there but programmed for few days later. And that person is a friend. What about if you program something more important?? (also the birthday of your boss could have a deep impact over your career, also the birthday of you girl/boy friend or your spouse- I have to admit that I forget very quickly and deeply, so I need assistance, isn't it?). This a real agenda or a joke? That what I mean how important is a part-word searching! That is, google is good, but this nasty missed feature matters! From who? Really from the biggest search engine in the world! Maan, unbelievable!

I think comparing searching one's inbox and other folders (labels) with a global web search is not realistic. It would not be feasible or desired to have a web search engine do partial word searches that are so imprecise.
However, with email I think it is absolutely necessary sometimes.
I have a massive Outlook file and can find stuff easily with partial word searches within Outlook.
Case in point: If I have an email from an ebay supplier called 'somerandomseller' and I seach for 'random' (because that's the only part I remember), I can find it instantly in Outlook. In Gmail - forget it.

Agreed. Of course this is an absolutely ridiculous omission from the point of view of usability. Google says we will never have to delete email again - except, of course, if we want any chance of retrieving one later on.

My guess also was that partial search dealt a blow to performance. Well, maybe, if partial word search was the default. But if a user was required to specify their desire for a partial word search by using a wildcard, it would only be used when required. A partial word search may take longer than a whole word search, but it`s obviously a hell of a lot quicker than having to manually search 1000s of emails.

I have just been invited to use Google Wave. I can't access it at work, but once I'm home I'm going to give partial word search a whirl. I'm not holding my breath. Btw, I did have a quick spin on Wave last night and it was nice. Very buggy at this preview stage, but nice all the same.

I'm just thinking at a possible recovery of a lost e-mail, it's time and resource consuming, but when I want it, I may have it. Just activate IMAP, set everything and download all my messages in an e-mail client Inbox. From there I may do what imaginable search I want. If this may solve the problem, I'm not sure what to do with the calender. I've seen that could be synchronized with some software but I don't want this! That why I have an online calender! Hey Google, come here, don't hide, give us real solutions!

I just got scolded for getting my collegues over to Gmail now that they discovered that wildcard/substring/stemming search is not supported.

Please fx, Google.

The issue is that google does NOT understand USABILITY and they do not understand that keyword matching and partial word search capability existed in many non-google products and user interfaces 10+ years ago. Nothing like back to the future and a "progressive" company that cannot implement known and expected STANDARDS. As well, google image search after 10 years is still limited to at most 20 results per screen. Failing to show the user "angela" when "ang" is searched in gmail is A MAJOR PROBLEM GET A @#$% CLUE YOU GOOGLE IDIOTS. Google needs to be called the BACKWARDS company. Lacking MAJOR KNOWN capability like this deserves strong direct criticism period.

well, ist now more than one year people complaining about that (at least in this thread) and no google reaction at all. The google labs feature Jerome mentioned 9 months ago i not at all satifying for lets say a search that says "label: inbox/*" to search all messages that have ever been tagged with the inbox/ tag or a tag below /inbox - for whatever reason I want to do this, its my human right to do partial words search on my data and google should now be aware that they can't sell this stuff to companies without at least giving them the power.

I'm planning on switching our small company to google apps and that kind of issue stresses me. I want to fight status quo and propose a true onlne innovative solution, I will give the Outlook/IMAP option if this problem arises. Thanks evtoma

Does anybody knows if Wave offers the possibility of true partial search. I've heard that wave will soon be available for Google Apps.

Pierre - In my limited use of Wave so far, I have been unable to use partial word search - appears there's no change from gmail.

Michael.w.dietrich - we're all on this forum cause we think it sucks that gmail doesn't support partial word search, but it's pointless talking about it as a breach of human rights. Google offers a broad suite of services at no cost to home users, and for the most part they are of a high quality, including gmail. You are right, however, that lack of this kind of functionality may cause them problems with paying customers.

I've read and posted to a number of forums on this and other gmail shortcomings. It seems the likely reality is some combination of stupidity, stubbornness and purposeful engineering of user behaviors. I wouldn't have included stupidity if it weren't for the years that went by without the introduction of a contact picker. Google have finally introduced one, so even if they previously had some purposeful strategy it was obviously wrong. It remains to be seen if they'll change their position on partial word search.

All in all, to be sure, it's a pretty peculiar situation.

I really like Gmail but when I need to do a partial word search...
not having it is super frustrating. Having designed several document
search engines myself I have a vague understanding why Google may
be wary to do this on their servers (however Yahoo can?)...
but with Google Gears (which allows for client-side databases/indexes),
I can't see why they couldn't offer this as on option via that route.
I'd be more than willing to give up even a GB of space to set up the
indexes to support this, even though it wouldn't take anywhere near
that much to accomplish partial word search.

I haven't read all of this thread but it seems like the search in Gmail isn't that reliable. I use Gmail for private email communication and like Pierre mentioned above, I intended to switch to Google apps/Gmail for my small company. But it seems to be not the 'smartest' solution :) Thus I did some research and found myself using Outlook again. I also read about an add-in search tool called Lookeen which seems to be quite accurate in terms of searching through emails and it's attachement. I think I'll try this unless Gmail has received some improvements... Anyhow does somebody know that tool or has other suggestions? Open for any alternative solutions...

I found that 12 months ago on January 4, 2009 Gmail was having access problems. I haven't been able to access my gmail for 2 days now (it's December 26, 2009). The site won't load and appears to be in suspended animation for the time being. Is anyone else having problems???

I am not having a problem with gmail access.

I also agree that this is a major problem. One of the main uses of a search tool is to find EVERYTHING related to a word/phrase. Only giving the option of an exact match makes it very easy to lose track of emails that are related to your topic of interest but just didn't contain the exact word. SOME kind of wild-card abilities is sorely needed.

Yeah agree, an annoying problem as well. I wonder why more people don't complain about the lack of partial word searching in gmail. It seems like an obvious problem worth fixing.

Hi,
the Outlook searchtool Lookeen is able to find what you want. If I type, for example, the name of a person in the search box, I get all mails from this person, the contact details, all attachments (..)

The results are presented in tabs like "all", "Mails", "Contact" ...
A very simple but very effective program. I can recommend Lookeen.

Here's the link to their homepage with more infomations:

http://www.lookeen.net

edit: sorry, this threat is mainly about GMail. Lookeen works only with Outlook.

Frustrated? Where's the pissed off button.

I just want to echo everybody else's pain and frustration. How can the 'king of searching' (or more like the 'king of taking advertisers money') not support partial word searching ?

I'm lucky that I only use gmail as a backup of hotmail for my home use as if I used this for work it would drive me nuts !

The best thing I can recommend is outlook and a program called Copernic - it is brilliant. It will index all your documents, emails and even things on shared network folders if you want. Partial word searches and it all runs surprisingly quickly too.

You could learn something Google ;-) Although I did have to pay for copernic for commercial use it's free for home...

Same problem here. How come Google, the king of search, does not even have a wildcard or regex search in its mail platform? Shameful. Come on, this is 2010!

Everybody keeps saying google is king of search... well apparently not with a missed feature as basic as this. If they really cannot provide the feature they need to officially say why.

Wow, this is shocking to find out that Google doesn't support this. I thought for sure there would be a way -- But I was sadly mistaken. I'd love to see some kind of "Advanced Search" or operator that would make this doable.