Searching¶

The search box in Mattermost returns search results from any channel of which you’re a member.

Searching multiple words returns results with any one of the words listed.
When results appear, click the Jump link to view that post in the channel archive.
You can expand the search results window by clicking the “Expand” button in the top right corner.
Use search modifiers, like from:dave, to return results only from certain people or in certain channels (see below)

Like many search engines, highly common words like the, which, are (known as “stop words”), as well as two-letter and one-letter search terms, are not shown in search because they typically return too may results.

Search Modifiers¶

From: and In:¶

Use from: to find posts from specific users and in: to find posts in specific channels.

For example: Searching Mattermost in:town-square only returns messages in Town Square that contain Mattermost.

“Quotation Marks”¶

Use quotation marks to return search results for exact terms.

For example: Searching "Mattermost website" returns messages containing the entire phrase Mattermost website and not messages containing only Mattermost or website.

Wildcard*¶

Use the * character for wildcard searches that match within words.

For example: Searching for rea* brings back messages containing reach, reason and other words starting with rea.

Hashtags¶

Hashtags are searchable labels for posts. Search for any posts containing a hashtag by clicking the hashtag in an existing post or typing the hashtag with the pound symbol into the search bar. Create hastags in any post by using the pound sign # followed by alphanumeric characters.

Valid hastags:

Start with a letter
End with any alphanumeric character (letter or number)
Are at least 3 characters long, not including the #
May contain dots, dashs or underscores

Examples: #bug, #marketing, #v2.1, #user_testing, #per.iod, #check-in

Hashtags do not link to channels. For example, if you have a channel named “Marketing”, clicking a #marketing hashtag does not redirect you to that channel.

Other notes:

IP addresses, for example 10.100.200.101, do not return results.

Technical Notes¶

Searching Chinese, Korean and Japanese¶

The best experience for searching in Chinese, Korean and Japanese is to use MySQL 5.7.6 or later with special configuration. Please see documentation.
You can search to some degree without this configuration by adding * to the end of search terms.

Differences between MySQL and Postgres search¶

By default, Mattermost uses full text search support included in MySQL and PostgreSQL. These databases have slightly different search behavior. Check Main Menu > About Mattermost to see which database you’re using.

For example, different databases have different “stop words” filtered out of search results. See database documentation on MySQL and Postgres for a full list. Other differences include:

PostgreSQL:

Email addresses do not return results.
Hashtags or recent mentions of usernames containing a dash do not return search results.
Terms containing a dash return incorrect results as dashes are ignored in the search engine.

MySQL

Hashtags or recent mentions of usernames containing a dot do not return search results.