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Slack has fantastic search. It has good filtering, sorting, and pagination, and has the right degree of fuzziness. I use it on a daily basis to discover the r

Slack has fantastic search. It has good filtering, sorting, and pagination, and has the right degree of fuzziness. I use it on a daily basis to discover the reasoning for things that happened before my time. I've never known anyone else who does this, and I've never understood why.

Minor49er 6y ago
I would do this at my last job, which was very Slack-heavy. I would even bring up any weird dev issues or bits of info that I came across that sometimes only mattered to me at the time, but it turned out to be helpful when I would search for those things months (or even years) later. My current job has both Basecamp and Slack. Most of the work discussion happens in Basecamp, which is fine. However, the search is pretty awful, so it's hard to get a quick and relevant response back when trying to find out more info about a given setting, feature, piece of code, or whatever else. There's a lot of extra digging involved with Basecamp's search results.
throwaway-42808 6y ago
That's encouraging. I haven't had the same experience yet, but I haven't worked for someone who pays for full search history.
- paxys 6y ago
  Every Slack plan has full search history, so really you haven't worked for someone who pays for Slack. Like, I get that it is expensive, but it's weird to run your company on a product trial.
  - throwaway-42808 6y ago
    Yep :) It's a weird way to try to save money, imo. Down the line it just leads to confusion and repeat work. They also underinvest in documentation, with the same result.
the_arun 6y ago
Well, Slack search experience could be done better. I prefer to see search results and selected thread with search keyword in the same view. It is annoying to keep going to every thread in the results and going to search bar again if that is not I was looking for.
dpcx 6y ago
I have struggled for years to find things that I know exist within Slack. I specifically (as a test) set up my email to forward all mail to a specific address in to Slack (https://slack.com/slack-tips/send-email-to-slack https://slack.com/slack-tips/send-email-to-slack) and found more often than not that Slack could not find something when searching for it. YMMV, of course. But my mileage was pretty terrible.
bt1a 6y ago
I second this, I am actually able to find tons of important communications on Slack that happened years ago at my work. Perhaps it is not well understood by many? I somewhat agree with the author, but what is the alternative to Email or a Chat Application?
- Torn 6y ago
  A product that does threaded conversations. Yammer did this pretty well, shame it never really took off for businesses

Minor49er 6y ago

I would do this at my last job, which was very Slack-heavy. I would even bring up any weird dev issues or bits of info that I came across that sometimes only mattered to me at the time, but it turned out to be helpful when I would search for those things months (or even years) later. My current job has both Basecamp and Slack. Most of the work discussion happens in Basecamp, which is fine. However, the search is pretty awful, so it's hard to get a quick and relevant response back when trying to find out more info about a given setting, feature, piece of code, or whatever else. There's a lot of extra digging involved with Basecamp's search results.

throwaway-42808 6y ago

That's encouraging. I haven't had the same experience yet, but I haven't worked for someone who pays for full search history.

paxys 6y ago
Every Slack plan has full search history, so really you haven't worked for someone who pays for Slack. Like, I get that it is expensive, but it's weird to run your company on a product trial.
- throwaway-42808 6y ago
  Yep :) It's a weird way to try to save money, imo. Down the line it just leads to confusion and repeat work. They also underinvest in documentation, with the same result.

the_arun 6y ago

Well, Slack search experience could be done better. I prefer to see search results and selected thread with search keyword in the same view. It is annoying to keep going to every thread in the results and going to search bar again if that is not I was looking for.

dpcx 6y ago

I have struggled for years to find things that I know exist within Slack. I specifically (as a test) set up my email to forward all mail to a specific address in to Slack (https://slack.com/slack-tips/send-email-to-slack https://slack.com/slack-tips/send-email-to-slack) and found more often than not that Slack could not find something when searching for it. YMMV, of course. But my mileage was pretty terrible.

bt1a 6y ago

I second this, I am actually able to find tons of important communications on Slack that happened years ago at my work. Perhaps it is not well understood by many? I somewhat agree with the author, but what is the alternative to Email or a Chat Application?

Torn 6y ago
A product that does threaded conversations. Yammer did this pretty well, shame it never really took off for businesses