Text Queries

Text search in Poly searches the actual content of your files — not just their names. Open search with ⌘ K (Ctrl+K) or the search pill, type, and results appear as you type.

Every query runs two searches

Whatever you type is searched two ways at once:

• Full-text — files whose indexed content literally contains what you typed: a PDF body, a spreadsheet cell, a code comment, an audio transcript.
• Semantic — files whose content means what you typed. "meeting notes from the offsite" finds "All-hands recap — Tulum" if that's what it is.

Results are grouped so you can tell which kind of match you're looking at, ranked by relevance, with low-confidence semantic matches tucked behind a less-relevant-results cutoff.

Very short queries (one or two characters) behave differently: they match against file names and tags only, so typing a couple of letters works like a quick file-name filter.

Queries are taken literally

There's no operator syntax in the search box — no quoting for exact phrases, no type: or before: modifiers (yet). Every character you type is part of the query itself. To constrain a search, use filters: the expanded search panel's Quick Filters, Filter, Tags, and Locations controls do everything inline operators would, and from the terminal poly search exposes each filter as a flag.

Matches take you to the spot

Search results don't just open the file — they open it at the match:

• PDFs and documents open on the matching page, highlighted
• Audio and video seek the player to the moment the match occurs in the transcript
• Text and code open in the editor with the match highlighted

What's searchable

Full-text search covers everything the intelligence pipeline extracts: document and PDF text (including OCR of scanned pages), spreadsheet cells, slide text, ebook chapters, plain text and code, audio/video transcripts, and the content of linked pages. Plain images are matched visually and by name — text inside an image isn't extracted, so reach for visual search to find images by what they show.

Scope

By default a search covers your Home and the Home of every shared drive you belong to. Archives are not searched.

To scope a search to one folder, right-click the folder (in the browser, breadcrumb, or sidebar) and choose Search within... — the folder appears as a chip on the search, removable like any other filter.

Tips

• Specific beats vague: "lease renewal deadline" outperforms "important document".
• Trust the semantic side — describe what the file is about, not what it's named.
• Too many results? Add a filter instead of more words.
• From the terminal: poly search "your query", with --text or --smart to run just one side of the search.