Press ⌘K
⌘K, or Ctrl-K, opens search from anywhere in the app. The sidebar has a search cell that opens the same thing. It stays out of your way while you are typing into a field: the shortcut does nothing inside a text box, a search input or a comment you are writing, unless the palette is already open. Search needs an account, because what it searches is yours.Scopes
The palette can search everything at once or narrow to one shelf. Eight scopes exist: all, library, history, highlights, articles, posts, feeds and commands.
Commands answers instantly, without touching your data at all — it is matching
against the list of things smry can do.
What is actually indexed
More than titles. A saved item is searchable by its URL, its title, its domain, its byline, its site name, its language, its tags, and — for files — its name and type. The full article text is indexed too, and so are your highlights, the notes attached to them, and your standalone notes. A link becomes searchable if it appears anywhere: your library, your History, a highlight, or a note. That is why a page you read once and never saved still comes back. Long documents are split so a multi-word query can match across distant sections instead of failing because two words were far apart. Feeds are the deliberate exception. Sources you follow are indexed on their discovery details only — title, author, URL and the beginning of the summary — never on retained full text. Entry matching needs at least three characters.There is no semantic search
smry matches words, not meanings. There are no embeddings and no vector search. A query for “how startups price things” will not surface an article about pricing psychology unless those words are in it. What it does instead is recover from the mistake people actually make, which is typing the word wrong.stratcheryThat finds Stratechery. Typo recovery runs on trigram similarity plus single-edit matching, and it engages when the query looks like words rather than a code fragment:
- 100 characters or fewer
- six terms or fewer
- every term is pure letters
- at least one term is four letters or longer
What approximate means
When typo recovery has run, the result says so: the response is marked
approximate and names which terms were matched loosely. Treat it as “I did
not find this exactly, here is what I think you meant.”
Two rules keep that from getting annoying:
- Article bodies are never fuzzy-scanned. A misspelling can find a title, a tag, a note or a highlight. It will not go hunting through the full text of every article you own.
- A fuzzy match never buries an exact one. An approximate library hit is not allowed to hide a literal match from your History, your highlights, a feed or a folder.
Query syntax
Unquoted words match across all the fields above, in any order.+ # @ : / . _ % -
are kept whole, so a domain, a handle or a version number searches as one
thing.
Questions
Is there a limit on how much I can search?
Is there a limit on how much I can search?
180 searches a minute and 20,000 a day, the same on every plan. Each query
gets a five-second budget before it gives up.
Can I find something I read but never saved?
Can I find something I read but never saved?
Yes. History rows are indexed, so a page you opened once is findable by its
title, domain and URL.
Why did my exact phrase return nothing?
Why did my exact phrase return nothing?
Quoted phrases have to sit inside one field and stay contiguous. Try the
same words unquoted — unquoted terms match across title, tags, notes and
body together.
Does search read my followed feeds' full text?
Does search read my followed feeds' full text?
No. Feeds are indexed on title, author, URL and the start of the summary
only. Save an entry and its full text becomes searchable like any item.
Next
Your library
What search is searching over.
Ask your library
When a question beats a keyword.
Highlights and notes
The passages search returns most often.
smry for readers
Back to the front door.