Search is trying to be too intelligent (finding related/translated words)
Recently, I tried to search my mails for plates
, which relates to a bug in a car-related application. There should be only one or two mails matching that keyword. I'm German, and most of my mails are in German, some are english.
Anyway, instead of finding these two mails containing "plates", I find hundreds of unrelated mails, which have unrelated words highlighted including
- "Platte" (German, means "plate"/"flat surface"/"hard drive" singular)
- "Platz" (German: place, available space)
- "Platzhalter" (German, means "placeholder", with "Platz" highlighted)
- "boilerplate"
and also several mails, where nothing seems to be highlighted at all in the order of arrival.
Can we please make the search be less intelligent, or at least give exact matches much higher sorting priority?
I could understand it finding maybe plate
(although searching in plural should be a hint that I want to search for the plural), but why is it finding German words that just have the same first 4 letters? Is it trying to correct typos? IMO it shouldn't do that, or it should only do that as a last resort (like Amazon does with "We have no products matching "satl", showing results for "salt").
PS: Searching for "plates"
(with quotation marks) seems to work, but that isn't obvious at all. If that's the preferred solution, I prefer a checkbox "Exact match" or something like that instead. Or it should be documented in a close way, for example near the search button should be a button "How to search" (or something like that), which lists all the options like quotation marks, "from:" and so on. Still, even if that were implemented, it shouldn't find that many false positives (unrelated words) by default.
Sorry for rambling, this is just showing that I find the current search very frustrating, I don't necessarily have a clear solution. Just searching for simple substring matches would be preferred by me over all this pseudo-intelligence, though.