Message Search

Together supports full-text search across all messages in a server, powered by PostgreSQL's built-in full-text search engine. This guide explains how to search, what results look like, and what limitations apply.

Opening Search

Press the search icon in the channel toolbar (or use Ctrl+F / Cmd+F if bound) to open the search modal. The modal scopes search to the current server by default. If you open it from within a channel, results are pre-filtered to that channel.

Basic Search

Type at least 2 characters to trigger a search. Results appear automatically after a short pause — no need to press Enter.

Each result shows:

• The author's username
• The channel the message was sent in
• The message timestamp (shown as "Today", "Yesterday", "N days ago", or a full date)
• A highlighted excerpt with matching terms shown in bold/highlighted

Clicking a result navigates you to that message and closes the search modal.

How Search Works

Search uses natural language processing (English stemming and stop-word removal). This means:

• Stemming: Searching running also matches run, runs, ran
• Stop words: Common words like the, a, is, in are ignored — they won't produce results on their own
• Case insensitive: Hello and hello return the same results

Search matches whole words by default. There is no substring or wildcard matching (e.g., hel will not match hello).

Filtering by Channel

When you open search from inside a channel, results are automatically filtered to that channel. A channel filter badge is shown below the search input confirming the scope.

To search across the entire server, remove the channel filter (click the × on the badge if present, or open search from the server level rather than a channel).

Result Ordering

Results are ordered by relevance first, then recency. The relevance score is calculated by PostgreSQL's ts_rank_cd() function, which weighs:

• How frequently the search terms appear in the message
• How close together matching terms are within the message

Messages with multiple matching terms close together rank higher than messages with a single distant match.

Pagination

Search returns up to 50 results per page by default (maximum 100). If more results exist, a Load More button appears below the result list. Clicking it appends the next page of results.

The total number of matching messages is shown at the top of the results panel.

Limitations

Limitation	Details
Minimum query length	2 characters
Maximum query length	200 characters
Language	English stemming/stop-word rules only
Deleted messages	Not searchable — soft-deleted messages are excluded
Cross-server search	Not supported — each search is scoped to one server
Attachments & embeds	Only message text content is indexed, not file names or embed metadata
Wildcards / regex	Not supported
Exact phrase matching	Not supported — word order is not guaranteed in results
Results per page	50 default, 100 maximum

Access Control

Search respects server membership. You must be a member of the server to search its messages. If your membership changes (e.g., you are removed from the server), existing search sessions will return a 403 error.

API Reference

For bot developers and integrations, the search endpoint is:

GET /servers/:server_id/search
Authorization: Bearer <token>

Query parameters:

Parameter	Type	Required	Default	Notes
q	string	yes	—	2–200 characters
channel_id	UUID	no	—	Restrict to one channel
before	UUID	no	—	Pagination cursor (message ID)
limit	integer	no	50	1–100

Response:

{
  "results": [
    {
      "id": "message-uuid",
      "channel_id": "channel-uuid",
      "author_id": "user-uuid",
      "author_username": "alice",
      "content": "The full message text here",
      "highlight": "...the full <mark>message</mark> text here...",
      "created_at": "2026-03-14T10:30:00Z",
      "rank": 0.456
    }
  ],
  "total": 127,
  "has_more": true,
  "next_cursor": "last-result-message-uuid"
}

The highlight field contains a short excerpt with matching terms wrapped in <mark> tags. Render it as HTML (ensure you sanitize to allow only <mark> elements).

To paginate, pass the next_cursor value as the before parameter in your next request.