Finding things with search

Search looks across three things at once: your projects, your conversation titles, and the text inside messages. It covers everything you can access, which includes conversations shared with you and anything owned by a team you belong to, not only the items you created yourself.

Open it from the search box on your dashboard, or with the global search shortcut from anywhere in the app. Type at least two characters and results appear grouped by type.

The three groups

Projects match on the project name and description.

Conversations match on the conversation title.

Messages match on the text of the message itself. This is the group that finds a half remembered detail from weeks ago when you cannot recall which conversation it lived in. Each result shows a snippet plus the conversation it belongs to, so you can jump straight to the right place in the tree.

When a message becomes searchable

A message becomes searchable a few seconds after it is finished, not while it is still being written. An assistant reply that is still streaming has not been indexed yet, so searching for a phrase from a reply you are watching arrive will not find it until the reply completes. Wait a moment and search again.

What the result counts mean

The number next to each group tells you how many results are on the page you are looking at. When there are more pages, the count is shown with a plus, like 20+. That is deliberate: it means "at least this many", not "exactly this many".

Use the "Show more" button rather than the number to decide whether there is more to see. The button is the reliable signal.

When search says it is temporarily unavailable

Message search occasionally reports that it is temporarily unavailable. This means the search service could not be reached, so we could not look. It does not mean there is nothing to find.

Two things worth knowing when you see it:

• Project and conversation search keep working. Only the message group is affected, so you can still find the conversation by its title and open it directly.
• It usually clears on its own within seconds. Try the same search again shortly.

If it persists, the conversation tree is still fully browsable in the meantime, and every message is still there. Search is a way to get to your work faster, never the only way in.

Tips for better results

Search matches whole words rather than fragments, so roadmap finds "roadmap" but not "roadmapping".

Distinctive words work better than common ones. If you remember a specific product name, error code, or unusual phrase from the conversation, lead with that instead of a generic word like "plan" that appears in hundreds of your messages.

If you know roughly where something lives, narrowing by project first and then searching is usually faster than searching everything and scrolling.