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But searches made in the drive UI are not. (and gmail history certainly is not, and actually drive files viewed in certain contexts aren't either)


> But searches made in the drive UI are not.

What? Yes they are! Browser history includes every page you navigate to, including the "search results for 'tps report'" page of a cloud storage service.


Ah you're quite right (I was expecting that the queries would be POST-like, not GET-like).

This distinction doesn't matter too much though, because having the browser be responsible for this fails in at least two ways:

1. The browser shouldn't need knowlege of how to parse every query language of every webapp you use.

2. The browser can't actually give you the results of those queries. If I search for "tps reports", the browser knows I entered that query string, but it doesn't know what the 15 results were, and so can't, for example take my prior search into account when I search for "12/17/2022" to uprank the TPS report for that date, as opposed to some other report. Nor can it even do the weaker bit and assume that since I searched TPS yesterday, when I search "reports" today, it should consider upranking tps reports.


I admire how focused you are on drive & gmail search quality. I have a lot of concerns about using user data to improve search that are larger than this specific feature or discussion. This leads me to implement strategies to reduce new data generated, such as loading URLs directly instead of accessing them from search. I’d like to conclude by conceding your approach will generate the better results, but that the best search results aren’t what I’m optimizing for.




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