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Today, with Amazon Chime when you have a chat room or conversation open, search will prioritizes search results from the current conversation or room over the search across all conversations and rooms.

Search also allows you to click on a specific messaging search result and quickly navigate to that specific message in the conversation or chat room.

Amazon Chime also provides options to its message search feature to help you find what you are looking for. These changes are designed to improve the accuracy of basic searches, and provide search refinement options so you can quickly locate content in all your 1:1, group chats, and chat room conversations.

Basic search

Previously, the search feature would include near matches to the entered text which could make the set of results too large to navigate. In the new search experience, if you enter a single word in the search bar, such as 'Amazon,' your results will include only messages that contain exactly 'Amazon.' Not any close matches, like 'Amazno.'

If you enter multiple words, separated by a space, such as 'Amazon Web Services' your results will contain any messages that contain an exact match for 'Amazon' and 'Web' and 'Services,' though they may not be in that order.

You can search for an exact match for multiple words by including double quotes around your query. For example, "Amazon Web Services" will only include messages that contain those three words in exactly that order.

Search refinement options

Beyond this basic feature, Amazon Chime message search now supports operators to help you filter results to more granularly find what you are looking for.

• + signifies the AND operation
  • Example: hello + joe + smith
    • This is same as default behavior with only spaces - 'hello joe smith', which will return any messages containing all of the words entered, though not necessarily in the same order.
• | signifies the OR operation
  • Example: hello | hi | there
    • This will return messages that have any of the complete individual words "hello" or "hi" or "there"
• - negates a single token
  • Example: hello -jane
    • This will return everything that contains "hello" but DOES NOT contain "jane"
• * at the end of a term signifies a prefix query
  • Example: Hel*
    • This will return everything that starts with "Hel," so would return messages that contain "helm" and "hello" and "helicopter".
• ( and ) signify precedence
  • Example: hello + (hi -there)
    • This will first search for results that contain ‘hi’ that do not also contain ‘there’. After finding those results, then only return results from that list that include the word ‘hello’.
• Quotes "" around the query signifies a phrase search
  • Example: "hello there"
    • This will return results that contain the complete phrase 'hello there'.
• ~N after a word signifies edit distance “fuzziness”
  • Example: hel~2
    • This will return all results that contain ‘hel’ and two more characters. This will return messages containing complete words like ‘hello’, ‘helm’, ‘help’, ‘held’. Edit distance can be a maximum of two, so queries can end in either '~1' or '~2'.
• ~N after a phrase (after double quotes) signifies “slop” amount
  • Example: "hi there"~1
    • This will return results that contain the exact phrase ‘hi there’ along with anything that is at a distance of one word. Results for the example could include ‘hi hello there’, ‘hi help there’, ‘hi there hello’.