Improve chat history search
It looks like those designing the Chat are not really using it. Searching the chat history is still an awful experience:
1. When you are in a conversation with a person and want to search for something, you want BY DEFAULT the results from the conversation with THAT person. But no, the smart designer of Chat was thinking to flood you first with a lot of results and then to ask you for few additional clicks to filter what you need...
Please change the default to show the results for the current conversation or add another quick find or provide an option to setup the default.
2. After you spend time filtering the results, someone had the "great idea" to limit the number of the results displayed. Really? So I know that the discussion is there but I'm not allowed to reach it other than scrolling manually few months back?
Please remove the limit of the number of the displayed results.
3. When you click on a found result, the conversation window it is showing only that sentence and the brilliant message: "Go to the channel to see the rest" :)))) And you click that only to discover that you need to scroll manually few months back :))))
Please jump directly to the day/hour of a found result and display the surrounding text.
4. It is not enough that you are limited regarding the number of the displayed results, but the Date range filter does not let you to select a custom time interval, for example: 1/1/2017 - 1/15/2017. You can select only "This year" and then it doesn't show you all the results :)))
5. Scrolling back through chat history it is terrible. You cannot jump easily to a previous week or month and you have to wait patiently until all the intermediary text is loading. Page Up stops working after a slower load of text and you need to click in window to make it work again.
Sorry for the angry tone, but I have a very hard time finding a lot of info I need. It is a pain to find fast and easy
Anonymous
shared this idea
Thank you for your continued feedback, we have addressed #1 in the list above. Contextual search within a specific chat or channel is now available. To learn more, please visit https://support.microsoft.com/office/search-for-messages-and-more-in-teams-4a351520-33f4-42ab-a5ee-5fc0ab88b263.
The feature team continues to make progress on these asks, and we will share an update when one is available.
114 comments
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emily g.
commented
So much #3 and #5! I am a more recent Teams adopter, and I just assumed that search results would be contextual like every other chat product out there. I lost tons of time trying to figure out what I was doing wrong, attempting to scroll up through 8 months of daily chats until that froze, and even contacting support (more than a dozen messages exchanged with the rep over two weeks before he was able to tell me that this is "by design"). All I needed to know was some time-sensitive info discussed in a previous chat! Please fix!
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Tolga Balci
commented
In Teams there are so many different ways to search for messages. All of them are confusing to me and in practice a nightmare to find what I am looking for.
I worry that with so many conversations I am now having in Teams instead of Email, I will lose the ability to find conversations about topics and issues that were discussed few years or months back. Outlook is my go to source for these now. Being able to find entire conversations on topics and issues I'm looking for is gold. Teams is a fantastic application for communicating but I feel like the value of all the information put there goes in to a void that is almost impossible to find anything in.
Forget about years or months, I'm having trouble finding messages from days a go.
Teams get a big fat F in my book search.
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damcify
commented
Fully agree. Especially on point 3 and 5. Trying to find important information in a chat history indeed returns a single message and not the whole context, including the previous and following messages. If you click on a result you just see that individual message.
Happily though, checking this one more time, I realise clicking on search results now does return the context i.e. the messages before and after the resulting message !
1.4.00.8872 is my current version. -
Anonymous
commented
Search is basically unusable for anything older than a few days - it's really slow to display the conversation that's clicked, then goes back to latest message after seconds for old messages around 3 weeks old and older, and goes back to latest message after minutes for messages a week old. Search performance goes downhill fast the older the message.
There are plenty of features, but the key needs are chat and searching of chat.
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Tom Fabrizio
commented
Everytime I have to look up an old message, teams is absolutely useless and requires me to scroll up for hours to get to the message I need. How has this not been implemented yet?
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Joel L
commented
Still can't see context around searches. This is basic functionality that is being straight up ignored.
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Josh Lerman
commented
Teams is an amazing program, but this is my top usability issue.
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Anonymous
commented
#3 and #5 are major blockers to moving to Teams. Need technical conversations to be archived and searchable.
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Anonymous
commented
The lack of search context is a bug not a feature. The search is BROKEN.
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Alexandre Parent
commented
Can't stress enough how much this would improve the search feature, which is basically useless right now if you search messages that are more than three months old. Stumbled upon an npm install issue which we have tackled months ago and I can easily search for messages within the conversation our team had about it, but without seeing the actual context around the messages, it is completely useless.
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Madhusoodhana Madhu
commented
We need to scroll back without using search button. Atleast add date button to scroll back. Really really needed. Its very long process to scroll back if we need to see everyones chats on Teams Channel
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Tom
commented
Please fix. It's baffling how this is even a thing. It's imperative that you look into this as a priority. You do realise this little thing called a global pandemic means your software is being used a lot more? You also realise a lot more information is transmitted electronically and no doubt will need to be referred to in the future WITH context. Literally, I (and I'm sure thousands of others) don't need new features. We just need you to fix this little one. Please.
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Adam Patek
commented
How can this be a thing in 2021?
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Thorsten Schneider
commented
Can we please get an update on this from Microsoft. The issue was clearly described by multiple people and the behaviour of the search functionality drives me nuts. Is it really that hard to store simple TEXT in the local disk cache ? Is there actually any chat history kept on the local machines or is everything loaded from the cloud whenever we scroll backwards in a chat ? Why would you do that ? Thinking about that, I'm still able to edit messages from last year summer. Of course such a functionality makes it necessary that every message is loaded from the cloud as anything could be altered. Why not only allow messages to be modified within a limited timespan ?
Anyway, the search functionality needs to be fixed. Soon
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John Michael Kane
commented
I still get notifications about meetings that aren't even on my calendar anymore, how do I stop that?
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Kota Abe
commented
The search function is almost useless because of these problems. We need to be able to jump to the location of the searched message.
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Jake Miller
commented
Yes, confirmed here as well. If you scroll up in the history to where the message is and then search, context will be displayed.
This is definitely a bug that was recently introduced, not a feature request, because I also remember it working before.
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Brian Kaphingst
commented
Here's a workaround.. Have someone that is in the same chat group search the term you're looking for and like it. This gives you an activity notification and if you click the activity it brings you to the message with the previous and ensuing messages in context. It took a bit to load, but I was able to find the answer, and not just the question, to what I was looking for.
That being said, Microsoft should fix this so you can search beyond 90 days and see the message within the context as well. Seems pretty basic.
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Anonymous
commented
Want to repeat how stupid this is. An example from two minutes ago, my colleague wanted to know where in a json data structure the timeout value should go. I knew I'd spoken about this before and searched "timeout". I found the exact conversation I wanted:
"do you know where to set an increased timeout for the generator?"
BUT! There's no context around that question for me to find the answer! Even more infuriating is that there are four other messages that mention "timeout" from the same conversation, but none of the intervening context that tells me what I want to know.
It's completely rubbish.
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Anonymous
commented
More than 3 years since I posted the 5 points above and they're still "Working on it" :)))
No comment!No, wrong, I have one: switch to another application! :)))