<story><title>Google Calendar now uses machine learning to help you accomplish your goals</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/12/google-calendar-goals/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>buro9</author><text>I wish they&amp;#x27;d just fix search.&lt;p&gt;I use Google Calendar heavily, averaging ~10 entries per day for the last 5+ years, and then some entries per day all the way back to when it was launched.&lt;p&gt;I can put information in easily enough, and with a few IFTTT recipes I&amp;#x27;m able to treat Google Calendar not just as a schedule for upcoming events, appointments and reminders, but as a historical log of everything I&amp;#x27;ve done. It is a time based database of my life... a diary.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve automated my diary taking into Google Calendar. The what, where and when of everything ends up in one of 12 calendars (each calendar is effectively a label to categorise a whole group of events that have occurred).&lt;p&gt;And it&amp;#x27;s brilliant.&lt;p&gt;Except for the search.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s really difficult to get the information back out. If I search for something I know that has happened, or has happened frequently, Google will delightfully tell me that I have matched 200 results, and then show me a list of 9 or 10 of them, with no way to paginate the remainder or search the old ones (it only finds upcoming, not past).&lt;p&gt;Search is broken on Google Calendar, to the point of being almost totally useless.&lt;p&gt;Far better to rely on time as a search dimension and jump around dates until one manually finds whatever you were looking for. It&amp;#x27;s that broken.&lt;p&gt;Compare to search on a product that has some love: Google Photos. Where now the miraculous occurs, I can search things like &amp;quot;Felicity skiing&amp;quot; and what will return are photos of my wife skiing, and an option to look at all other photos on those days. A simple search and all the results you want, and a single click to expand to view it in the wider context that makes sense.&lt;p&gt;Google Calendar really needs a decent search. It feels far too much like writing to &amp;#x2F;dev&amp;#x2F;null at the moment. Your information went in there, but the chances of you finding it when you wish to reference it are pretty non-existent.</text></comment>
<story><title>Google Calendar now uses machine learning to help you accomplish your goals</title><url>http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/12/google-calendar-goals/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>danieldk</author><text>This is one of those things that only the GooglePlex bubble can come up with.&lt;p&gt;As a busy person (my wife and I both work, we have a child, and hard time constraints due to teaching obligations, etc.), free time is exactly what I want to schedule as little as possible. I want to spontaneously decide to do a hike with my family, or when my daughter wants to play, I want to be there. There&amp;#x27;s enough obligations already, free time should be spontaneous and available to family.&lt;p&gt;It is also a bit annoying that they focus on these features without solving real problems first. Someone already mentioned search, which is (ironically) indeed quite bad. Also, appointment suggestions based on e-mails has very low recall. I especially noticed this since I switched back to Mail.app, which picks up a lot more dates in e-mails.</text></comment>