Bugs and Suggestions

I know Telegram handle searches on their server, which has a number of benefits; but it's also undeniably true that the current search function is essentially useless for a major part of the userbase, which is a serious issue that has to be fixed. Just look at the number of thumb-ups this thread has, it speaks volumes about how people have been longing for this.
Therefore I have a proposal: just split search function into 2 parts: first is the server-side search that is exactly the same as the current search; then there is this client-side search, which enables user to use the computational power of their own devices to search for partial text in the data that has bee synced to their devices (maybe put up a remider that you will only be able to search for what is already been synced to your device, any chat history that is only on the cloud will not be searched). Then give us a toggle to switch between those 2. It is a compromise from both sides that I think will satisfy most people.
Whether the devs adopt my idea or not, please make this search function revamp a priority, all the affected users will be tremendously grateful!

Deleted Account Jan 26, 2021

Admin Dog

Could you describe the issues you had in more detail?

The issue is a little stranger than I had initially thought. It's always been my experience that when I try to search for anything on Telegram, I only get partial results, often missing the message that I was trying to find. I had chalked it up to Telegram not being able to run partial searches, but I just ran a few tests and even that doesn't seem entirely true.

When I am searching for text in Chinese or Japanese, I get almost no result back, as entire sentences are written with no spaces in between words. My experience with Korean is a lot better, as they DO use spaces to break up words, but they don't break up everything. Most notably, (I guess I can only write in English here,,, words in brackets are expressed as a single, unbroken chain of character in Korean)

BE verb is expressed through a suffix added to the noun itself
[Airplane is] flying

Some compund nouns are not separated by spaces
[Airplane ticket]

In this scenario, searching for ”airplane” will return neither of those examples.

....except, that it SOMETIMES does, and I cannot figure out why only SOME of those are returned when searched. All of this ends up giving the users a very inconsistent search experience

Mingye Wang Jan 28, 2021

In addition to allowing naive substring search, true word search can be quite easily implemented with SQLite's FTS tokenizers. The ICU tokenizer works well for a lot of languages. It might oversplit a bit, but that doesn't mess up searching.

Deleted Account Jan 30, 2021

Even though O have my conversations in English mostly, I'd like to see this coming. I can confirm this on Telegram Desktop for Windows.

Deleted Account Feb 26, 2021

Should also improve the ability to search files for Asian regional languages

Kevin Kelly Feb 28, 2021

Telegram's search engine can't work well to Chinese Japanese or Korean characters, because the engine identifies the strings by spaces and punctuations, but Asian characters no spaces between words therefore Asians use the engine difficultly.

I have two available suggestions for the search engine: overhead the engine, search for characters directly; or do not overhead the search engine, add the invisible spaces between Chinese Japanese and Korean characters.

Mia Zoe Mar 11, 2021

I would also like it for Spanish, it would be easier to search for conversations / chat in keywords or related to what you wrote in a message

Jervis Mar 15, 2021

Will there ever be an update on this suggestion? This is a very inconvenient issue for us Asian users, and I would be more than happy to see it added.

박

박형우 Mar 16, 2021

Jervis

It seems that Telegram CEO doesn't think I18N seriously. Telegram won't become the winner of Asian market unless 'poor search' issue is addressed.

Deleted Account Mar 16, 2021

박형우

Well, for some people, the mere existence of a language that do not use alphabets and/or space seperation is just beyond their imagination.

idoleat Apr 6, 2021

Hope we can get this fix in 2021. Feel free to ask for help from community on this topic. We are all willing to help. Keep up the good work!

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