Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't use the name - "Mr Floppy at the beach" is meaningless, but "dog at a beach" will probably yield a lot more. I've found google photos search to be pretty good, and if it can't find something usually the map-mode is enough to pin it down (e.g. go to the beach where you took the photo and it shows you the photos from there)
Thanks for the suggestion. I did just check, and "dog at beach" generates sub 20% recall for me. I go to the beach weekly with my dog, take lots of photos because I'm a dork, and that first query skips many weeks. Also, I did add my dog as a known / named pet under the explore tab, which is why I thought the name should work. I can make it work by picking out the beach via geo, but I think the whole thing illustrates…
It was also hobbled quite hard near the start as they had a scare with searches for "gorilla" accidentally returning pictures of black people so they have probably turned all the safety knobs they have up to 11, even if that impacts recall.