Google Calendar fail
We use Google Calendar - a lot. Between Les and I we have five calendars - one for each of us, one for Erin, one for the twins, one for the .NET user's group I lead. At one point we had seven (an additional one for Morgann and for our old church, which is still being used on their web site). It has a lot of nice features, and if you have Android phones the integration is seamless. All in all, I like it.
But today I hit something in Google Calendar that is quite simply inexplicable. First, I want you to think about Google - what they are, what they're good at. Now, go to Google (just plain Google) and search for a date. The query I used was 10/24/2012. First, it shows you the answer to (10/24) / 2012, which is non-optimal but understandable (0.000207090789, in case you're wondering). But the search results show lots of things about that date. As does searching for "October 24, 2012." Bing, too. Yahoo, too. Wolfram Alpha immediately understands you're talking about a date, not a fraction of a fraction, and gives information about that date (it's a Wednesday).
Now go to Google Calendar and in the prominent search box at the top of the page, try and search for that date, either by digits - 10/24/2012, or by the full date - October 24, 2012.
Nothing.
Really?
...
Really?
...
That has to be the single biggest "miss" I can think of, especially for a calendar, ESPECIALLY for Google. You know, the empire built on search.
It's been twelve hours since I first discovered that and I still can't believe it. Searching for a date, especially a date quite some time away, seems like a completely natural quick navigation technique. Especially for a search engine. But it doesn't work. Bizarre.
6 comments:
Wow, that IS weird. I never noticed before, because I always just page through to find a date.
In Labs you can add a "Jump to Date" widget, but something like this really ought to have been standard.
I know, right?
And I eschew most "labs" features because I've had them screw up/slow down both calendar and Gmail (which, I know, is why they call them "labs"). But this just seems so NATURAL to me I can't imagine how it missed requirements from day one.
"I can't imagine how it missed requirements from day one."
This has the smell of something that was debated and decreed, possibly due to feature triage.
Probably true.
I just searched for the same date in my iPad calendar. No hits. The logic is that a search will be for text you've entered and that there are myriad ways to page through the calendar (I can hear the annoyed developer explaining it to me now.....). :-)
Lynn, I concur, that is "the logic," but I'm a developer, too, and I'm annoyed something so obvious wasn't implemented.
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