Forum Discussion
Teams search changed, and is now useless
I don't know when this happened but search has changed in teams recently, and it's unbelievably useless. Searching within a single conversation isn't intuitive. Took me forever to figure out how that works. But the biggest problem is that now when I search it returns results and in the past when I'd click the item in the results list, it would take me to that point in time of the entire conversation. Now it just shows me the single message and I can't see the entire conversation surrounding it. Since the conversation was back in July, and this is a person I talk to all day every day scrolling back to that point in time would take a VERY long time.
Basically we're encountering an issue in our development environment that happened previously and I fixed it back in July but it's happening again and I don't remember what we did to fix it. So I search for the term I need, get the messages around that time in July, and I see just that one message but I need to see the entire conversation.
This is a terrible change that wasn't thought through. How can I get it to rewind to that point in time without having to scroll up for 20 minutes?
- 6 Months later, this still hasn't been fixed. This is absolutely useless.
- I'm glad I'm not the only one. The search function has never been great, but I tried to search for something back in late January 2022 and Teams doesn't function at all. Providing me the specific message I sent is all well and good, but whoever thought it would be a good idea to just display one message without you being able to see any context needs firing. I can't believe a simple function like this hasn't been fixed.
THIS. The ability to search back to prior conversations (and see the ENTIRE conversation) was invaluable for being able to reference retroactive discussions. I feel like this is a standard feature on all messaging apps (I used Skype prior to Teams) so it's really confusing as to why this was intentionally changed for the worse.
GrowlinkRicky Yeah the search is only "working" when searching for something a couple of days old, and that's because its easier to scroll back when you know the date, but other than that is useless, it just shows that part of the conversation and that's it, no way to go to the entire conversation. I have always said it and apparently still gonna say it, teams suck, if it was for me I'd go back to slack.
- Is it still broken and it's 2023? This is a key functionality, how come it hasn't been resolved?
In the new Teams preview version the search is actually very fast and responsive (as is the rest of the application). You can enable the preview version from the Teams Admin Center on your MS tenant.
This appears to be "fixed" in the new Preview version of Teams.
GrowlinkRicky I noticed the same. Please note that they have on their roadmap for an extensive revamp of the search of Teams which they say is rolling out in november. In the little information I've found about it they support clicking a chat and going to that full conversation. So I think this may be a temporary issue.
I am also truly hoping that the teams search will also get some backend upgrades like searching in OneNote, searching the wiki, searching lists, searching tasks, searching OneDrive, searching Sharepoint sites and more. At the very least they could support the generalized Microsoft Search functionality with the connectors. Unfortunately I've been unable to confirm this and I think it's because this is actually just a very basic GUI revamp and nothing more 😞
MelmixDKNovember has come and gone and its still junk
- Here's the roadmap item for the new AI powered search https://www.microsoft.com/en-ww/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=&searchterms=66583
Simply adding the official support page
- This was fixed a couple weeks after I made the original post. Clearly a bug. Search results now come with context.
GrowlinkRicky it's still an issue for me. Any chat in a channel goes to the context of the chat, but any chat in a 1:1 only shows that single chat message. It's really annoying. Oh well I hope it's fixed for me soon as well 🙂
Adding to this, scrolling through chat history is disjointed, jumpy, doesn't load all messages, and is bloody hopeless.
Clicking on a replied to message sometimes gives a "This message has been deleted" message. When it hasn't been deleted. It just hasn't been loaded in the cache.
Ugh.
- Teams search is now completely broken, finding things is very difficult, and then actually accessing something if you manage to get it to show in the results is impossible.
Not sure how they can bungle this so bad, Mine only changed today. You must have had a beta test?- It's really awful the new search. It can not find the documents I need in the general search, but shows different results if I change over to the document only search. It still doesn't search anything else in Teams like tasks, lists, wiki, shifts or anything else. This seems to have done nothing positive at all to the search experience?
- I think they want to search once for all...but really...sigh, a lot of tickets under our communication
- Definitely broken UI. I used to be able to do this. My workaround (for 1.5.00.8070) is to "Pin" the search results message, and that gives you a banner in the chat window. When clicked on, it scrolls you back in time.
Teams Search is so bad! completely useless
