Slack search filters help you sort through work chat clutter
Find the right conversation or file without wading through fluff.
Searching in Slack can be... difficult. If you're looking for a specific conversation or file, you may end up wading through pages of fluff to find that one chat you're looking for. Mercifully, it's about to become much easier. Slack is rolling out search filters that provide a much, much overdue ability to whittle searches down to narrower criteria. You can limit them by specific people, channels, file types and date ranges. Looking for what a coworker said about a project last week? You can probably track it down quickly.
The company also told Engadget that the searches themselves should be 70 percent faster thanks to "improvements on the backend."
The filters should take a few weeks to reach users. This could be one of the more important updates to Slack in a long time, though. It could prove particularly helpful for larger organizations where you might have to sift through thousands of employees and dozens of channels, but it'll also affect just about anyone (including personal users) who's ever been frustrated with a Slack search. And those are important when Slack has to compete against not just heavyweight alternative like Atlassian, Google and Microsoft, but smaller-scale group chat services like Google Hangouts.
