[DSMan195276]

I actually think it's fair to say the chat search in Teams is basically unusable. You can search them, sure, but it only finds single chat messages with no way to go to that message to read the context around it. So, if the chat message you find has the word you wanted but not the information, then you're basically out of luck unless you keep guessing words and find the message with what you wanted.

I think I understand why it works this way too. If you search _channels_, then the search will show the messages with that word but link you to the entire conversation that message appears in. But for chats, each individual message is basically treated like it's own conversation and thus search only displays the single message with no context.

A quick Google suggests I'm not alone in this criticism, and it's been a problem for even longer than I've been using Teams (a year or two): https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams/teams...

[stagger87]

I'm able to search chats on my phone and PC and go to that message when I search, and get all the context around it. Even messages that are several years old. I just tested it. Maybe it's just your Teams settings?

[DSMan195276]

I figured I would go check and it seems you're somewhat right, for newer messages (a few weeks) it does link me straight to the chat message so I can view the messages around it. Older messages from Ex. last year still have the behavior in the screenshot of the issue I linked - 'Go to message' simply takes me to a screen with only that message displayed and no others, with no way to actually get to that message in the chat. Obviously I don't have an easy way to tell yet if it's fixed for all messages going forward, or if it only works for recent messages, but either way it's some progress. Presumably in time I'll be able to tell.

So I donno, perhaps it's something funky with our Teams deployment, but this is such a basic feature that I have a hard time understanding how it could ever be implemented this way. Certainly no other chat service I've used has had this kind of problem.