The Atlantic [read free]: “Searching your email can sometimes feel basically impossible. Typing in a mix of search terms goes only so far. At some point, it almost feels personal, like the software is purposefully not showing you a conversation you absolutely remember having…An email inbox can’t quite be searched in the same way, because algorithms are working off of far less data. “Your emails are yours and yours alone. My emails are mine and mine alone. And they are different,” said Zamani, who previously worked on search for Microsoft and has done research for Google. The machines can learn only so much about how to rank the important emails in my inbox and yours, because they can see how you interact with these messages—which ones you open, which ones you ignore—but that’s not a lot of data. Sure, if you get the search term right, it can pull exactly what you’re looking for, and you can filter by date, sender, and a few other things. But you might have tons of emails from the same sender using the same few terms. Web search, by contrast, can rank results by leveraging a history of billions of clicks.”