When we need it most, search sucks

I have more digital stuff than ever before. My work email account is nearly 20 years old. My personal email is even older. I have gigs and gigs of old photos and documents and songs and videos in the cloud and on physical backup drives. I will probably never need whatever's inside "Junk april 2011," but you never know.

And then there's the world wide web: Boy there's a lot of stuff on there. What we need now are exceptional search engines to help us sort through all this stuff and find what we're looking for.

But search sucks.

I swear Gmail is just messing with me sometimes. I searched for a specific recent email about Metal Gear Solid Delta today and it was nowhere to be found in the results. It turned out that the subject line in question just said "Metal Gear," so Gmail decided to entirely exclude it from the results.

It did, however, show me emails about Gears of War, Delta Force, "liquid metal," "metal heat spreaders," and an "all-metal chassis."

The tech industry would have us believe that AI is going to solve this, so I prodded Google's Gemini chatbot to find the same email. It only succeeded after I modified my query in the same way I had to for regular search.

Finding local files on my PC is better, but to hell with the Windows 11 search bar for searching Bing when I just want to find stuff on my computer. If I type in "Shasta" to find my recent vacation photos, I'm presented with information on Shasta College. If I hit the "Photos" tab, it shows me other people's photos of Lake Shasta. Stay in your lane, Windows! I'll open a web browser if I want to look at professional landscape photos instead of my much worse photos of the same place.

At least you can find your stuff with the Windows Explorer search bar, though not by default. I used to think Windows 11 search was unbelievably bad, because I'd ask it to find a folder called "taxes" and it would spin its wheels like I'd demanded a proof of the twin prime conjecture. Turns out it wasn't indexing most of my PC.

By default, Windows 11 only indexes the stuff in your user folder; you know, the one containing the default Documents and Pictures folders that no one actually uses. Whole drive partitions were unindexed until I changed the setting. Go change it now in "Privacy & Security > Searching Windows" to lead a happier life.

And then of course there's web search, and Google's AI overviews, which recently told me that The Alan Parsons Project's "Games People Play" is a cover of a 1969 Joe South song. (I realize this is a very particular example so let me assure you that this is not the case.)

Search in 2025 isn't all bad. I like that I can type "cat" into my phone and find photos of cats. Often, though, it's totally inadequate and feels like it's getting worse when we need it most. Perhaps tech giants wish we'd stop searching for anything at all, and would prefer it if we'd just accept whatever context-stripped information they want to put in front of us.