Google Instant will most likely never come to GMail search. The speed at which GMail queries are returned simply aren't fast enough for real-time search, and it's unlikely Google has a monetary incentive to improve the speed to this level. Remember, GMail search is a feature; Google Search is a business.<p>There are a few reasons GMail search is slow:<p>* GMail searches must search a genuinely real-time index of your e-mails. An e-mail must be searchable the instant it's created. Web search has an inherent latency which allows Google to do offline processing to improve search speed.<p>* It follows that, GMail must be an exact match, while Web search is an approximation.<p>* Popular queries can't be cached and returned quickly.<p>Source: <a href="http://www.quora.com/Why-does-Gmail-take-longer-to-search-my-inbox-than-Google-takes-to-search-the-entire-web?q=gmail+search+" rel="nofollow">http://www.quora.com/Why-does-Gmail-take-longer-to-search-my...</a>
Gmail doesn't even have substring search (e.g. searching for "hack" will not find instances of "hacker"). I think that would be a prerequisite for Instant-style searching.
I don't know about you, but I find that Gmail searches take quite a bit longer to process than web searches because they can't be cached and they cannot have <i>any</i> latency. Sometimes it takes multiple seconds just to process a seemingly-simple search of my mail.<p>How would they be able to really quickly (instantly) perform accurate and up-to-date searches of mail if a single query can take multiple seconds in its current state?
Suggest a feature for Gmail: <a href="http://mail.google.com/support/bin/static.py?page=suggestions.cs" rel="nofollow">http://mail.google.com/support/bin/static.py?page=suggestion...</a>
I wrote a Windows application which reads in all your email files and creates an SQL database/index, along with a Lucene index for searching the email body.<p>You can do an SQL wildcard search like SELECT * from mymail where SUBJECT like "%Gmail%", and the results are more-or-less instant.<p>I use it all the time for my own purposes, but nobody wants to beta test it.
I would settle for GMail to be usable again, let alone improved. As of right now, I can't send or reply to any email's from any account[1], I can't search within my emails, I can't view emails that aren't on the front page anymore or are archived, etc.<p>Its not a matter of it being slow; its a matter of clicking a button before lunch, and the page still not being loaded when I sit down again afterwards[1]. And it happens on three different accounts; one @gmail, one free Apps and one paid Apps.<p>1. Wired connection, its not timing out or anything like that.
Cloudmagic does just that! I've been using it for about a week, works really well.<p>Here's the link: <a href="http://www.cloudmagic.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.cloudmagic.com/</a>