Search is one box at the very top of the sidebar. With it you can find what you need across the whole product without walking through the sections: type a word and see which channels, posts, authors and comments contain it.
What is searched
- Channels — the title, @username and description of your channels;
- Posts — the text of publications in your channels;
- Authors — the name and @username of people who write in the monitored sources;
- Comments — the text of comments under source posts and the names of their authors.
The Message Feed — the messages collected from sources — keeps its own search with filters: it is still there and is not replaced.
How to search
- The box at the top of the sidebar: just start typing — results appear as you type, there is no Search button to press. The beginning of a word is enough:
marketfinds both “marketing” and “marketers”; Ctrl+K(or⌘Kon a Mac) puts the cursor into the search box from any page; on a phone the sidebar opens by itself;Enter— open the first result,Esc— clear the search and return to the page you were on;- Results are gathered into groups — Channels, Posts, Authors, Comments — each with a count, and title matches come first. A click on a row opens its own place: the channel, the post, the author card or the message with the comment in the feed.
Why it is fast and always fresh
Search does not have to re-read the whole database on every query: under the hood there is a full-text index on disk. That is why the answer comes back instantly and search does not get heavier as the number of messages grows. The index lives in the data volume (/apps/telegram/search-index, the path can be changed with TELEGRAM_APP_SEARCH_INDEX_FOLDER), survives an application restart and is picked up again without a long rebuild. New posts, comments and author edits appear in results a couple of seconds after they happen. Search works without a license too.
Honest limits
- It matches the beginnings of words, not word forms: a search finds words that literally start with what you typed, so other grammatical forms of the same word are not picked up automatically;
- There is no semantic or AI search and no synonyms: only what really contains the letters you typed is found;
- Results are plain text without highlighted fragments, and each group shows a limited number of them (up to 20) — there is no paging through all matches;
- Deleted comments, and comments whose source message is already gone, are dropped from results; the messages collected from sources are searched in the feed’s own search, not here;
- Freshness takes a couple of seconds, not zero: a post or comment published right now may not be in the results for a moment.
What is next
What exactly lands in the feed and how to read it is in Message Feed, about channels — in Channels, about authors — in Authors, about comments — in AI Comments. If you need to search from your own script rather than by hand, see the external API.