Searching Thread Content

How Search Works

All thread content in Smithy is encrypted at rest — your data is never stored in plain text. To make search possible without compromising this protection, Smithy generates semantic embeddings of your threads using Voyage AI when Automatic Knowledge Capture is enabled.

Embeddings are mathematical representations of meaning, not the original text. They allow Smithy to understand what a thread is about and match it to your search query by meaning rather than exact keywords. This means a search for "deployment process" can surface a thread titled "how we ship to production" even though the words are different.

Your data is never used to train AI models. See our Privacy Policy for details.

Cross-Channel Search

To search across all channels where Smithy is enabled, use:

Smithy searches every channel in your workspace that has Thread Mode turned on and returns the top results as a private message. Results are grouped by channel and include the thread subject, a content snippet, and a direct link to the thread in Slack.

Search results include Show tags and Only show mine toggle buttons. Use Show tags to display the tags assigned to each thread in the results, and Only show mine to filter the results down to threads you created. These are the same filter controls available in /thread open and /thread stale.

This is the best way to discover knowledge spread across multiple channels — find past decisions, resolved questions, and documented processes no matter where they were originally discussed.

In-Channel Search (Find Related Threads)

In addition to cross-channel search, Smithy can search within a single channel using the Find Related Threads button in the thread creation modal. This is designed to catch duplicates before they happen — if someone already started a thread on the same topic, you'll see it before creating a new one.

See Finding Related Threads for full details on how this works.