Text search not including URLs (on mobile)

[orthand]

• [x] I have searched open and closed issues for duplicates
• [x] I am submitting a bug report for existing functionality that does not work as intended
• [x] This isn't a feature request or a discussion topic

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Bug description

Searching for text snippets of URLs is not showing results in the iOS app (cant test it for Android) while it works on desktop.

Steps to reproduce

• Send message with link (e.g. www.test.com) to yourself/another user
• Search for "test"/part of the link

Actual result: Message shows up in desktop app but not on mobile

Expected result: URLs are searched on iOS as well and results are the same on all platforms

Device info

Device: iPhone 13 mini

iOS version: 15.5

Signal version: 5.37.1.1

[jrose-signal]

Thanks for the report, this is one of a few ways we'd like to improve our search logic.

[stale[bot]]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[stale[bot]]

This issue has been closed due to inactivity.

[zbuchheit]

I wanted to check on the status of this. My friend’s and I all use the group functionality regularly and they are discussing switching platforms because they want to be able to easily search Spotify song links they share. I’d much prefer to keep using signal as we are happy with the service otherwise. If I could be of any assistance in any way I’d love to help. Thanks!

[crd477]

This is a pretty serious deficiency, in my opinion. I estimate that somewhere between a third and half of the searches that I perform are for some portion of a URL (e.g., domain name) that I know I have sent to someone or received from someone in the past.

[crd477]

For what it's worth, it appears to be dependent on where in the URL the search string appears. For example, this worked: But this one did not:

[jrose-signal]

This issue is for the iOS client specifically; problems with the Desktop client should be reported on the Signal-Desktop repo (or https://support.signal.org/).

[crd477]

My mistake, sorry about that. I guess I've gotten too comfortable using these clients interchangeably. For the record here, neither of those searches I just mentioned above worked on my iPhone (iOS 16.5, Signal-iOS 6.26.0.8) that had the same test messages stored in Note to Self:

[johschmitz]

I am also facing this issue on iOS with YouTube links in the format https://youtu.be/<hash> and the search string youtu. Note that the message contains only the URL, not sure if that makes a difference.

[Miguel-Signal]

@johschmitz @crd477 Could you email https://support.signal.org/ with your debug logs so we can look into this further?

To share a debug log from within Signal Desktop, go to the menu, click on View, Debug Log, Submit, and copy the link.

[johschmitz]

@Miguel-Signal I don't fully understand, do you mean to send a test message from Signal Desktop to the iPhone contact and then create the log file on the sender side in Signal Desktop?

[nobodyme]

I have this same exact issue as well.

[zbuchheit]

@jrose-signal @EvanHahn-Signal @max-signal @Miguel-Signal I was curious if anything that could be done to help assist in this issue? It has been open a year now, and I know this is probably a less-prioritized issue to fix, but is there anything that can be done to help?

[whiskeykilo]

I have this issue too. It would also be useful to have URL previews included in search along with the URL itself

[Teknoky100]

it would be cool to have it almost like on whatsapp, links in media tab and the option to search for a link by interpreting it like a message, that way you could search for any keyword in a link and find them