★ Yahoo!, fix the damn Mail Search Engine
If you CTRL click on the GO buttons next to the Yahoo! Mail built-in search engine, you will get a pop up windows explaining the current shortcuts one may use to refine a query. Not only is this highly inconvenient, it seems to be broken.
Many people in the Mail Group have been complaining about the search engine not indexing properly old messages. Yahoo! seems to have resolved the issue for non advanced queries. I suspect the problem might have to do with indexing emails while using asynchronous Javascript (but then I’m much more of a web designer than a web developer!)
Now the advanced search shortcuts, in addition of being unusable are way too much restricted. I forward all my voicemail from Orange FR over to Yahoo! Mail. They are delivered in a Real Audio format. A search like attachmenttype:ra simply returns nothing.
Check this out :
It may not seem to be a problem that needs to be illustrated but it feels the Mail team does not understand what’s going on here. Did they simply cheat and preset the most common attachment types instead of deploying a system capable of recognizing the file type of a joint file ?
Now I mentioned the pop-up box opening up to display those shortcuts. they mention attachmenttype:jpg. Well it just does not work either. Instead they default it to attachmenttype:jpeg…and yes, I agree with you, that’s not really smart.
The way the search engine work in Yahoo! Mail is a real problem when compared to Gmail. It’s not intuitive and not friendly. The search result should not default to show snippets. I should be able to turn this off once for good damnit! And again, I should be able to create internal links to specific queries, an option given by Gmail and a smart way to create a filter. Finally a search assistant is highly needed to offer a graphical interface to those shortcuts.
