Viva Engage Explained: Search

Every person's search results are different. Just like the home feed, Engage search is personalized. When you search, we don't just look at the words you typed - we consider who you work with, which communities you're active in, and what content is most likely to be useful to you specifically.

So how does search work? What happens when you type a query and press Enter? And how can you search more effectively? Let's take a closer look.

The search experience

Search in Viva Engage has two stages: suggestions as you type and full search results. Each is designed to help you find what you need as quickly as possible.

Stage 1: Instant suggestions

Even before you start typing anything, when you click on the search bar, you are presented with suggestions based on your previous searches. As soon as you start typing in the search box, Engage shows you instant suggestions before you even press Enter. These suggestions are organized by type:

• Query suggestions - popular and related search terms that help you refine your query
• Ask Copilot - an option to have Copilot answer your question directly using knowledge from Engage
• Communities - matching communities you can navigate to directly
• People - matching users so you can jump straight to their profile
• Campaigns - campaigns that match your search terms

As you type "copilot," Engage instantly shows related query suggestions, matching communities like "Microsoft Global Hackathon 2025," and relevant people - all before you press Enter.

These suggestions are designed to save you time. If you see the community, person, or campaign you're looking for, you can click it directly - no need to go to the full search results page.

When to use Ask Copilot

You'll notice that the autosuggestions include an "Ask Copilot" option at the top. This is especially powerful when your search goes beyond simple keywords and becomes a full question or request.

Here's a good rule of thumb: if you're typing more than a couple of keywords, consider using Ask Copilot. When your query looks more like a sentence or question than a keyword search, Copilot is often the faster path to an answer.

 

How it works: When you click "Ask Copilot," your query is sent to Microsoft 365 Copilot, which searches across conversations in your Engage network and generates a natural-language answer with citations. You'll see a summarized response with links to the source threads - so you can always verify and dig deeper.

License requirement: Ask Copilot is available only to users with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license. If you don't have a Copilot license, the "Ask Copilot" option will not appear in the search suggestions. All other search features - keyword matching, meaning matching, personalized ranking, and filtering - are available to all Viva Engage users.

Think of it this way: regular search helps you browse and discover. It's ideal when you want to see a list of posts and scan through them yourself. Ask Copilot helps you get answers. It's ideal when you have a specific question and want a synthesized response instead of scrolling through dozens of results.

Both options are available in the same search box - start typing and choose the path that matches your intent.

Stage 2: Full search results

When you press Enter (or click the search icon), you land on the full search results page. Results are organized into tabs so you can focus on exactly what you're looking for:

 

The full search results page for " copilot" - notice how the matching keywords are highlighted in the post preview, and results show the community name, author, date, and reply count.

You can further narrow your results using the filter bar at the top of the results page. Filters include Date, Posted by (a specific person), Posted in (a specific community), and an All filters option for advanced filtering.

How search finds your results

When you search in Viva Engage, a lot happens behind the scenes - all in less than a second. Here's a simplified view of what happens:

 

 

 

 

Keyword matching + meaning matching

Viva Engage uses hybrid search - two fundamentally different approaches that run at the same time and complement each other:

Keyword matching finds posts that contain the exact words you typed. This uses a proven information retrieval technique that considers not just whether your keywords appear, but how often they appear and how distinctive they are. A rare, specific word like "hackathon" carries more weight than a common word like "team." This is great for specific terms like project names, acronyms, or someone's name. If you search for "FY26 Q3 OKRs," keyword matching finds posts that use those exact terms.

Keyword matching also draws from two pools of content: exploration results (discovery-focused, across all content you can access) and affinity results (personalized, weighted toward people and communities you interact with most). These two pools are merged to give you both breadth and personalization right from the start.

Meaning matching uses AI to understand the intent behind your query. Your query text is converted into a mathematical representation of its meaning (called an "embedding"), and then compared against embeddings for all threads in the network. Posts with similar meaning are surfaced - even if they use completely different words. For example, if you search for "team morale ideas," meaning matching can surface a post titled "Fun Activities to Boost Team Engagement" - there's no word overlap, but the meaning is the same. Only results that meet a minimum similarity threshold are included, ensuring quality.

Why both? Keyword matching is precise and predictable. Meaning matching helps you discover content you might have missed. Together, they cast a wide net - typically evaluating hundreds of candidate posts - before narrowing down to the most relevant results for you.

Privacy and permissions

Engage applies strict permission checks. You will only ever see content you have access to. Posts from private communities you haven't joined, or threads that have been deleted, are never shown. Note that content from communities you've muted will still appear in search results - muting affects your feed, not search.

Personalized ranking

After finding all the potentially relevant posts, Engage uses a machine learning model to re-rank results specifically for you. The model evaluates each candidate post across over 100 different signals, organized into several categories:

• Text relevance - how well the post content matches your query, measured through multiple dimensions including term frequency, term importance, match density, and which part of the post the match appears in (title, body, or replies)
• People affinity - how much you interact with the person who wrote the post, across Engage, Outlook, Teams, and other Microsoft 365 tools. The system computes a personalized affinity score between you and every author in the result set
• Community affinity - how active you are in the community where the post was shared, based on your visits, replies, and engagement history with that community
• Semantic similarity - three separate AI-computed similarity scores: how close your query meaning is to the post content, to the post author, and to the community where it was posted
• Recency and time signals - when the post was created, how much time has elapsed, and time-decay factors that naturally boost newer content
• Engagement signals - view counts, reply counts, reactions, and the user's own search and click history help predict what they'll find valuable
• Highlight quality - where in the post the matches appear, how concentrated they are, and how prominent the matching sections are

This is why two people searching for the same thing may see different results. If you work closely with someone in the engineering team and they posted about "hackathon," their post will naturally rank higher for you than for someone who has never interacted with them.

Speed and performance

All of this - hybrid candidate generation, feature computation across 100+ signals, machine learning ranking, and permission filtering - happens in under a second. Several techniques make this possible:

• Parallelism - keyword and meaning matching run simultaneously, not one after the other, so the total time is the duration of the slower search, not the sum of both
• Smart caching - when you view the first page of results, Engage pre-fetches and caches the next page in the background. This means pagination feels instant - clicking to page 2 or 3 serves cached results with no delay
• Batch processing - signals like engagement history and community metadata are fetched and computed in optimized batches rather than one at a time

The result is a search experience that feels instant while doing sophisticated work behind the scenes.

Searching for people

Viva Engage search isn't just for conversations - it's also a powerful way to find people across your organization. When you search for a person, Engage matches against:

• Display name - first name, last name, or both (e.g., "Rajesh Jha")
• Job title - search by role (e.g., "engineering manager" or "principal PM")
• Email or alias - search by email address or alias prefix

People results appear in both the instant suggestions dropdown and the People tab on the search results page. Each result shows the person's name, profile picture, job title, and email - so you can quickly identify the right person even when there are multiple matches.

Tip: If you know someone's email alias, searching for it (e.g., "chrzeng") is often the fastest way to find them. Searching by job title (e.g., "product manager Engage") helps you discover people you may not know by name.

Searching for communities

Looking for a community to join? Search matches against community names and descriptions. This means you can search by topic (e.g., "accessibility," "onboarding," "women leadership") and find relevant communities even if the exact word isn't in the community name.

Community results also appear in the instant suggestions as you type, making it easy to navigate directly to a community without visiting the full results page.

A few examples of how community search works:

 

Keyword highlighting

When you land on the search results page, you'll notice that your search terms are highlighted in the post previews. This helps you quickly scan results and understand why each post was returned.

Highlighting appears in:

• The thread title (if the post has one)
• The body text preview - Engage shows the most relevant snippet of the post with your keywords highlighted
• Replies - if a reply matches your query, it's shown with highlights below the original post

For example, searching for "AI tools and copilot" highlights each matching word in the results, making it easy to see how the post relates to your query at a glance.

A note on highlighting: We’re aware that keyword highlighting may not appear consistently across all result types. For instance, topic names and community names are indexed and searchable but are not currently highlighted in the search results. We’re actively working to improve highlighting consistency across the search experience.

Search on mobile - the same engine, designed for your pocket

Search in Viva Engage works the same way whether you're at your desk or on the go. The mobile apps (iOS and Android) use the same search engine, ranking, and personalization as the web experience - so the results you see on your phone are the same quality you'd get on the web.

On mobile, the search results page is optimized for touch and smaller screens: result cards are streamlined, tabs let you tap between Conversations, People, Communities, and more, and tapping any result takes you straight into the full thread. Use search on mobile to stay connected with your organization's conversations on the go - catch up on town hall recaps, hackathon updates, or announcements from anywhere.

What impacts your search results?

Your search experience improves over time as Engage learns from your activity. These actions directly influence the quality and personalization of your results:

1. Join communities. Joining relevant communities and leaving ones you're not interested in helps search understand what topics matter to you. Results from communities you've joined receive increased weight.
2. Interact with posts. Liking, replying to, and viewing posts tells search which content and authors are relevant to you. The more you engage, the better your people and community affinity scores become.
3. Follow people. Following leaders and colleagues is one of the strongest signals for search personalization. Posts from people you follow get a natural ranking boost.
4. Join relevant communities. Being a member of communities helps search understand your interests and can surface more relevant content from those communities.

Good to know: Engage uses the same affinity signals as the home feed. If you've been improving your feed experience by following people and joining communities, your search results are benefiting too.

Tips for more effective searching

Engage search learns from the signals you provide. Here are some ways to get better results:

Be specific

• Instead of “strategy,” try “FY26 company strategy.”
• Adding context like dates, team names, or product names helps search find exactly what you need.

Use the tabs

• If you’re looking for a person, click the People tab.
• If you’re looking for a community, click Communities to focus results on the right content type.

Filter by date

• Use the Date filter to narrow results to a specific time period.
• Especially useful if you roughly remember when something was posted.

Filter by author

• Use the Posted by filter if you remember who posted it.
• Helps narrow results to a specific person’s posts.

Filter by community

• Use Posted in to limit results to a specific community.
• Helpful when you know where the conversation happened.

Ask Copilot

• When you see Ask Copilot in the suggestions dropdown, click it.
• You’ll get an AI-generated answer drawn from Engage conversations.

Use search operators

• Use AND to require all terms e.g., safety AND store
• Use OR to broaden results e.g., hackathon OR innovation
• Use NOT to exclude terms e.g., hackathon NOT 2026
• Use quotes for exact phrases.
• Operators can be combined e.g., (hackathon OR innovation) AND 2025

Search by hashtag

• If you know the topic or campaign tag (e.g., #CopilotStories), search for it directly.
• The Topics tab shows all matching hashtags and their associated threads.

We're always improving

The Viva Engage search team is continuously improving the search experience. As you use search, you're helping it get smarter. Your interactions - the results you click, the posts you engage with, and the communities you join - all contribute to a better experience for everyone.

Have feedback on search? Send an email to rarajase@microsoft.com - we're listening.