On 15 Nov 2013, at 22:01 , Kevin Callahan <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Nov 15, 2013, at 7:46 PM, LuKreme <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 
>> On 15 Nov 2013, at 19:45 , Kevin Callahan <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 
>>> Are people satisfied not being able to search on a string of terms or limit 
>>> their search to subject? or from? etc?
>> 
>> Yep. The search is so fast that it hardly matters, and better matches seem 
>> to appear first.
> 
> But they don't. 
> A friend of mine needed to search for a specific string of text that he knew 
> he'd written as a subject.  
> The search came back with hundreds of emails.  Any email with one or more of 
> the words in the string was returned regardless of where the word existed in 
> the email:
> Subject, To, From, BCC, Message body...
> 
> Turns out, the string he needed to search was about 5 words and contained 
> "Cornell"l.  He not only got all messages with the term "Cornell" in the 
> message body or subject heading, it returned any email with an address 
> containing "Cornell”.

See, I would consider that to be “better matches appearing first.”

> Results were completely wrong.
> 
> I've tried the same thing.  I get FAST results, for sure, but they are not 
> what I want.  
> Try searching for a specific string of terms.  You get emails that contain 
> the individual words - and they don't appear to be ranked by the complete 
> string, followed by emails with the partial string.

A search for foo bar sin tap moo does search for foo OR bar OR sin OR tap OR 
moo.

Searching 101: If a query term generates too many results, then it’s not useful 
as a query. I agree that it is a sham there is no way to search for a phrase 
(evidently) in iOS 7 mail. I’ve tried grouping with “” and () but neither of 
those seems to work.

> I know it's not a problem for you, but it is a show stopper for many. 

It means reconsidering what you are searching for. I’m sure Apple’s (unsaid) 
stance is that for real searching, use OS X and that the search in iOS is 
designed to be fast.

> I agree, the results come back very fast with iOS 7, I love that.
> But if the results are wrong,

I’ve seen no evidence they are wrong.

> or hardly meaningful, then you end up spending an inordinate amount of time 
> reading all the headers to find the email you thought Mail would find for you.

The solution to me is to search on something else. If I get thousands of emails 
from cornell and putting cornell in my query returns all this emails, then I 
don’t put cornell in my search query.

Either that, or hope Apple lets you search for a phrase in iOS 7.1. I think my 
first suggestion is more likely to generate useful results though.


-- 
My advice: Live a life worth dying for.


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