Search your workspace

Open workspace search, read the results and the preview, and open or act on a result without leaving search.

Workspace search looks through the workspace you are in, all at once. It finds mail, events, files, your Workspace AI chats, members and contacts, workflows and their runs, and the workspace’s mailboxes, calendars, drives, mail folders, labels and connected accounts. It also finds commands, settings pages and your other workspaces.

Search works whatever your AI settings are. Only Ask the assistant, the New chat command and the MCP clients settings page need AI.

Open search

You can open search in two ways:

Click Search (the magnifier icon) on the left rail, just above Inbox. Its tooltip reads “Search · Ctrl/⌘ K”.
Press Ctrl + K (⌘ + K on a Mac) on any page of a workspace, including its settings. The shortcut does nothing while you are typing in a field or in the message editor. It does not work on your account settings or on the instance dashboard.

Until you type, the search box shows a few example searches as a hint.

The search window with an empty search box and the list of commands

When you open search from a mailbox, calendar or drive

If you open search while you are in one mailbox, one calendar account or one drive, the box already holds a filter for it, such as mailbox: followed by the mailbox’s short name. The filter is selected:

To search only there, press the End key and type your words after it.
To search the whole workspace, just start typing. Your words replace the filter.

If you open search from All inboxes, from all calendars or from All drives, the box starts empty.

Before you type

With an empty box, search shows up to three groups:

Saved searches: the searches you saved in this workspace, each with its name and the search under it.
Recent searches: the searches you used lately in this browser.
Commands: things you can do right away, such as Compose mail, New event or Go to members.

Click a saved or recent search, or move to it and press Enter, to put it in the box and run it. See Saved and recent searches.

Run a search

Type what you are looking for

Type one or more words. Results appear a moment after you stop typing. To narrow the results, add filters such as type:file or from:sam. See Narrow a search.

Look through the results

Results are grouped by kind, under headings such as Mail, Events, Files and Members. The words that match are in bold. Use the Up and Down arrow keys to move through them.

Check the preview

The Preview pane on the right shows the details of the result you are on. The first result is highlighted for you. For mail, the preview shows the sender, the recipients, the date and the message text. When there is nothing in the list, it says “Pick a result to see it here.”

Mail results for a search, with the first result shown in the preview pane

Good to know:

If nothing matches, you see “Nothing matched that search.”
If an account could not be searched, you see “Some places could not be searched:” followed by the accounts, or the kinds of result, that could not be searched. Results from every other place still appear.
Mail and Files end with Load more when there are more results. Click it, or move to it and press Enter.
To see which words match which kind of result, see Free text.

Open a result or act on it

Every result has a list of actions. The first one runs when you click the row or press Enter. For most results it is Open, which takes you to the item and closes search.

To see all the actions for a result:

Move to the result. Then do one of these:
- Press Tab. While suggestions show at the top of the list, Tab picks a suggestion instead.
- Press Right arrow when the cursor is at the end of the box.
- Press Ctrl + Enter (⌘ + Enter on a Mac).
- Click the … button on the row. Its label reads “Actions for” and the result’s name.
The list of actions takes the place of the results, under the result’s name. The magnifier icon becomes a back arrow (Back to results).
Move to an action and press Enter, or click it. Press Esc or click Back to results to go back to the results.

The list of actions for a mail result, such as Reply, Archive and Star

Actions that delete or remove something are shown in red. Most of them ask you to confirm first.
Actions that open a page close search. Actions that change an item in place, such as Archive, Star or Mark read, keep search open so you can carry on.
If an action does not work, a message pops up with the reason.

For every action of every kind of result, see Results and actions.

Close search

Press Esc, or click the X (Close search) at the right of the box. If the list of actions is open, the first Esc goes back to the results, and the next one closes search.

Search on a phone

On a phone, search opens as a sheet that fills the screen from the bottom. There is no preview pane and no line of keyboard hints. Tap a row to run its first action, or tap its … button to see all its actions.