Chat Search
Chat Search allows you to search across indexed conversations in Chief using keywords, phrases, and chat titles. Search results include both user prompts and assistant responses, making it easier to revisit previous work, recover context, and continue past conversations.
Written By Patrick Intervalo
Last updated 17 days ago

Overview
Chat Search helps you quickly find information from previous conversations without having to manually open old chats.
Once chats are indexed, you can:
Search across past conversations
Find both user prompts and assistant responses
Search using keywords or partial words
Open directly to the matching message in a chat
Search chat titles
Mention previous chats in a new conversation as context
Chat search works across indexed chats within your accessible Projects and organizations.
How Chat Search Works
Chat Search indexes conversations and allows you to query them using keyword-based matching.
Search checks:
User messages
Assistant responses
Chat titles
Results are ranked using a combination of:
Keyword relevance
Recency
More relevant matches appear higher in results, while newer conversations receive an additional ranking boost.
Accessing Chat Search
Chat Search is available through the Search interface in Chief.

You can enter keywords, topics, prompts, or phrases into the search bar to retrieve matching conversations.
Search Matching Behavior
Chat Search uses token-based keyword matching with prefix support.
Prefix Matching
Each search term matches as a prefix.
Example: bud
Can match:
budgetbudgetingbuddy
This helps surface variations of a word without requiring exact matches.
Multi-Word Searches
When searching multiple words, all words must appear somewhere in the conversation.
Example: quarterly budget
Matches chats containing both:
quarterlybudget
The words do not need to appear beside each other and can appear in any order.
Case & Punctuation Handling
Search is:
Case-insensitive
Punctuation-insensitive
Example:
LakerslakersLAKERS
All return the same results.
What Search Does Not Support
Chat Search currently does not support:
Fuzzy matching
Synonyms
Stemming
Exact phrase matching
Example: running
Will not match:
ranruns
If broader matching is needed, shorter roots may help.
Example: run
Can match:
runrunningrunnerruns
Understanding Search Results
Each result includes a label describing what matched.

Assistant Results
Assistant results indicate the matching content came from an AI-generated response.
The result preview displays:
A snippet of the assistant response
Highlighted matching terms
Example: A user asks about the Lakers. The assistant generates a response discussing the Lakers. Searching for βLakersβ returns the assistant message.
User Results
User results indicate the matching content came from a user prompt or message.
The result preview displays:
A snippet of the user message
Highlighted matching terms
Example: Searching for Lakers OKC game may return the original user prompt discussing the game.
Title Results
Title results indicate the chat title matched the search query.
Title results only appear when no individual messages inside the conversation also matched. This prevents duplicate search entries for the same chat.
Opening Search Results
Selecting a result opens the conversation directly to the matching message.
This allows you to:
Revisit previous conversations quickly
Continue earlier workflows
Recover prompts and outputs
Navigate directly to relevant context
Using Chats as Context
Chat Search also supports bringing previous conversations into a new chat.
You can:
Search for a previous conversation
Select matching chats
@mention them into prompts

This allows Chief to reference earlier conversations while generating responses.
Search Ranking
Search results are ranked using both relevance and recency.
Ranking considers:
Strength of keyword matches
Frequency of matching terms
How recently the conversation occurred
Recent conversations receive additional ranking weight.
Permissions & Access
You can only search chats they have permission to access.
Search results are scoped to:
Accessible Projects
Available organizations
Indexed conversations within those environments