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.