How could Google allow Google Calendar search to be broken for more than two years?

I use Google Calendar to capture work done for clients because it is a great online calendar tool, and it's free. But the mediocre search experience is indeed a huge PITA. The search results, advanced or not, are inconsistent, and I can't figure out how to reverse engineer the defect. So I found a workaround - check out http://gtimereport.com.com which I use to extract my GCal events and can then manipulate the data in Excel. GCal search sucks, but it sucks even more for paying Google App users who are paying for this defective and seemingly ignored Calendar search experience.

The immediate solution that everyone can use, posted by Bruce Stein, 7/19/14, at the https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/calendar/j64BvyFwvuM%5B1-25%5D site: Print your entire calendar with notes.  Print to PDF, then search the PDF.  It's simple: 1. Where you select Day/Week/Month/Agenda, select Agenda button 2. Next to the Agenda button, under the More pull-down, select Print 3. At the Print Range, select date range 4. At the Font Size, select Smallest 5. Press Print Descriptions 6. Hit Print, or Save As. 7. You're done Bruce said, "I do this every few months just to be safe. Let's be honest, Google can one day decide to re-do the Calendar without warning, and I certainly don't want to lose several years worth of information!" I printed nearly an entire decade, 2007-2015, into one PDF document, and it's only 3MB.  I load up my calendar with a TON of data (like a journal), but searching for anything in the PDF is still super-fast (immediate). If you don't know how to print to PDF, get the free program "PDF Redirect" at exp-systems dotcom.  Then you can always print documents to PDF, saving them on your computer.  I've used this program for almost 10 years.  It's completely free, even for commercial use, with no tricks at install, no nagware, no popups, no watermarks, no hassles at all.

This is an essential feature for anyone who seriously uses the calendar feature for planning.  It IS severe, and it is NOT rare.  A more significant aspect is that it fails almost silently (if you don't count the number of results returned and compare it to the number it indicates).    I own vacation rental properties and use Google calendar to schedule housekeepers.  I need to generate a report for each housekeeper so she knows what her work commitments are.  I simply want to search by the housekeeper's name, but when there are 14 matches, only 6 of them are displayed I can't rely on that.  So instead I take type into an email as I scroll through the calendar (introducing transcription errors at times.)   I also have attempted to use the search to proof my son's soccer schedule.  It's provided as a list and I enter it into the calendar.  I'd like to report it as a list to make sure I got it all right.   This is a significant defect, and as a software developer with 35 years of experience, I would be embarrassed to have this sitting out there for so long.    It's time to put money into fixing products people actually use rather than into building offshore data centers and tapping into private wi-fi networks.

Every piece of software is broken. Getting 100% of the bugs out of software is impossible, mostly because fixing bugs has a chance of adding new bugs. Therefore problems that are reported internally or discovered externally are prioritized based on the impact and the number of users that encounter this bug. And the lowest priority bugs are not addressed at all. Your listed problem is not that severe. And rather rare. Who has 200+ upcoming events that fall under the same search? And how would a list of 200+ events be more useful than just scrolling through you calendar in the first place? Most likely the project managers who made the call to not alter Calendar further figured that users would just do a work-around of making a more specific search. The King of Search probably feels that 200+ results from a search is not useful to users, even if they could scroll through the items. In fact, 50 is probably too many. I just did a search for "Burning Man" in my calendar and got more results than could fit on one page. It scrolled just fine for me. But then, we are talking about less than 30 individual events, not 200. Why not place these events in a new calendar so you can toggle that list of events on/off or even display ONLY that set of events? Making separate calendars is easy and allows you to organize things into big and manageable buckets.

Moreover, it's not just that you cannot see the bulk of the search results. Sometimes the search is just plain wrong.  Try searching for something with an apostrophe in it - when I try I either get zero results, or results which bear no resemblance to the search term.

I have the same problem. And I have had to circumvent the limitation by going into Advanced Search and painfully specify a narrow time range at a time in order to search through, say 10 years, of data of when and what DVD movies I have watched.  The data is there. The walk around is there. And Google is THE search engine of the world. Yet Google simply refuses to allow users to page through the query results! Google is arrogant in dictating the use cases of its Calendar app.  I've been held hostage many times for using more than a dozen Google apps regularly.  One example is the Gmail Call Phone which allows dialing the number by name; however, if the name has a Gmail account listed in your Google Contacts, the query would fail. (See @fifty2weekhi http://fifty2weekhi.blogspot.com/2013/08/not-all-contacts-show-up-in-gmails-call.html)

Many forums and helpdesks have been flooded with this question, yet he answer is quite simple: Google provides sevices to earn money. No  money is earned with searches in Calendar, in contrary: it costs money  to go through the database. The older the date, the more cost. That is why Google hasn’t fixed this for years and will never fix it - it's as simple as that.