Search

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Overview

Dovetail has two ways to search and surface data across your workspace. Quicksearch is designed to help you view your recent interactions, navigate to content you know exists and shortcut around your workspace to pages like settings. Quick Search is designed to help you move from query to insight with minimal friction. Explore is a visual search experience that helps teams move through highlights, projects, conversations, and customer moments across their workspace, making it easier to understand patterns, evidence, and the real experiences behind customer feedback.

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Using search

To open Quick Search, click the search bar or press ⌘ K or Ctrl K on your keyboard, then enter your query. Quick Search displays relevant Dovetail objects such as projects, folders, docs, notes, and key navigation items. To dive deeper in Explore, click the Explore to the right of the text box or command⌘ E

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Quick search behavior

Quick Search adapts based on how you search:

• Question-style queries automatically trigger an AI summary.
• Keyword searches take you directly to the best matching result.

When an AI summary is loading, pressing Enter opens the summary first. You can press Enter again to jump to the top result. For keyword searches, pressing Enter immediately opens the best match.

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Exact matching

Add quotation marks to return exact matches. For example: “customer onboarding” Without quotes, search may include similar terms.

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Get answers with AI summaries

When your search looks like a question, Dovetail automatically generates an AI summary to surface relevant evidence and insights. AI summaries help you understand patterns and themes before opening individual results.

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Continue in Chat

From an AI summary, you can open the result in Chat to keep exploring your question. Your original query carries over, so you can ask follow-up questions without starting again.

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Navigate with Quick Search

Quick Search also helps you move around Dovetail. Key navigation items, such as settings pages, now appear directly in search results. This lets you access important pages without leaving the search menu.

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Refine your search results

Search supports a range of filters to help you narrow results:

• Anything – Any Dovetail object such as themes, data, and docs.
• Anywhere – Restrict results to specific channels, projects, or folders.
• Anyone – Content created or contributed by a specific person.
• Anytime – Filter by time range.
• Title only – Search only within titles.
• More – Additional filters for fields, tags, published content, archived content, and more.

By default, search excludes contacts, tags, highlights, and themes to keep results focused on core content.

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Sort your results

Results are sorted by Relevance by default. You can also sort by:

• Created
• Updated
• Name

Use the sorting controls in the filter bar to change the order.

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Ask questions with Chat

Chat lets you ask questions across your workspace and explore results in more depth. It automatically applies context based on where you are, so you can zoom in on specific projects or expand to your entire workspace. Learn how to use chat in your workspace today →

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Ask questions via Teams and Slack

You can also ask questions about Dovetail data directly from Slack and Teams using integrated search and summaries. With the Ask add-on, users can:

• Ask questions in Slack or Teams and receive summarized answers with source references.
• Receive scheduled text or audio digests with key insights and customer quotes.

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