Oh yeah it's not great either I agree. But the use case for Google Docs is somewhat different in my mind. It's good for collaboration and discussion, rather than a source of truth to describe "how things are right now". It's annoying if you can't find a particular document immediately but it's not the end of the world. Discussion on a Google Doc will happen for a few weeks or a quarter, then die down and the doc will seldom be looked at again. You might link to it from tricky parts of your codebase but it's not essential to a high-level understanding.

Confluence and other wiki systems are clearly meant for longer-lived documentation and canonical information. You should link from or attach your working documents (spreadsheets, slide decks etc) to your wiki documentation for people to discover why certain decisions were taken. But if the wiki's discoverability is poor or it's not well-maintained or regularly reviewed, it's basically useless.

Interesting. Not that long ago we moved everything out of Confluence into Google Drive because GD search worked. Confluence search was horrible to find docs I knew were there.

Do you mean searching within a document, or searching with google drive? I've found that google drive search is incredible, they've done a great job of indexing everything.

Not a fan of Google docs either, but I recently discovered CloudSearch which imo does a better job at searching Drive (and searches emails too, and few other places).

link: https://cloudsearch.google.com