Ask HN: Why is Gmail so incompetent at basic search?

I'm South Asian and my personal email reflects that, so I get spam from India despite never having lived there.

I tried searching for one specific character to mass delete spam, "₹" (quoted in the literal query), and the search returned a few matches and then the rest were extremely obviously not remotely matches.

Why has a search company compromised a flagship product's ability to search?

Has anyone developed a workaround so that they can actually search their inbox and act on the results? Should I download Thunderbird or something?