Searching & finding documents

Press ⌘K (CtrlK on Windows and Linux) and the command palette finds documents by keyword instantly, in an overlay that floats in front of whatever you were doing. The Ask CompassDocs page goes further — plain-English questions, answered with citations. Both respect every permission: you only ever see documents in spaces you can access, and drafts only if your role can view them.

The palette searches more than documents — people, spaces, settings sections, and actions are all in the same list. Type / instead of ⌘K to open it filtered to documents only.

How ranking works

Results are ordered to put the document you actually want first:

• Title matches outrank body matches. A document titled “Deploy” beats one that merely mentions deploying. Titles carry the most weight, then the summary and tags, then the body text.
• Exact title hits get a boost, so searching “incident response runbook” surfaces the runbook of that name at the top.
• Freshness breaks ties. When two documents are otherwise equally relevant, the more recently updated one wins — stale copies sink.

Search is also lenient by design: it matches on any of your words rather than demanding all of them, so a near-miss still returns useful results.

Search operators

Narrow a search by mixing these operators with your keywords. They work in the Ask CompassDocs search box:

Operator	Example	Matches
type:	type:sop onboarding	Documents of a given type (sop, runbook, …)
tag:	tag:release deploy	Documents carrying that tag
space:	space:engineering incident	Documents in one space (by name or URL slug)
author:	author:"maya chen"	Documents by an author (quote multi-word names)
status:	status:draft	Drafts or published — see note below

Combine freely: deploy type:runbook space:engineering finds runbooks about deploying in the Engineering space. Each active operator appears as a chip below the box — click the × to remove it.

An operator-only query with no keywords (e.g. just type:sop) browses the newest matching documents, so you can use search as a quick filtered list.

status: and drafts

status:draft only returns drafts to people whose role can see them (Editor and above). Viewers never surface drafts, with or without the operator.

Search by meaning (semantic search)

With semantic search enabled, CompassDocs also matches on meaning, not just words — “how do we handle refunds?” finds the reimbursement policy even when no term overlaps. Semantic hits are blended with keyword hits (so the best of both rises to the top) and carry a small related badge. It’s an admin toggle under Settings → AI.

Ask CompassDocs

The Ask CompassDocs page answers questions in plain English. With an AI provider configured, it synthesizes a cited answer from your documents; without one, it falls back to the best-matching snippets. Either way, answers are grounded only in documents you’re allowed to see, and every source is a clickable link. “Who”-style questions also surface matching people from the directory.

You can even ask from Slack or Microsoft Teams — the same grounded, cited answers, in-channel.

Nothing found?

The empty state suggests what to try: fewer or more general words (search also matches by meaning), removing a filter chip, or narrowing with the operators above. The ✨ answer at the top of the Ask page often helps even when no single document is an exact match, because it reads across your whole knowledge base.

In-space search

Every space has its own search box that scopes results to that space — handy in a large space. It uses the same ranking and the same permission checks.