Why It’s So Hard to Search Your Email

Before a flight, I get a Pavlovian stress reaction—not from the prospect of hurtling at 30,000 feet in a concrete tube, but from my email inbox. Airline tickets sometimes get lost in an email abyss, requiring a few stressful minutes of frenzied searching when it’s time to check in. “I can’t find my confirmation for this flight in my email but I know I bought it 😭,” goes one tweet. “Gmail search is amazing,” another user posted just last week. “You can search something like ‘flight sacramento receipt 2023’ and it will somehow manage to serve up literally every email in your inbox that isn’t the receipt for the flight you just took to Sacramento.”

Searching your email can sometimes feel basically impossible. Typing in a mix of search terms goes only so far. At some point, it almost to the movie in his email and ended up buying another. Over Zoom, I asked Hamed Zamani, a search expert at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, if he ever has trouble finding an email. He smiled and said, “Who doesn’t?”