How Search Works
Eventually the question stops being "can this help me write the unit plan" and becomes "where did I put the unit plan." Here's what you can search, what your agent can search, and how it works underneath.
What you can search
Every list page has its own search box:
| Where | What it searches |
|---|---|
| Documents | Titles, body text, spreadsheet cells |
| Files | Filename, and the text inside parsed PDFs |
| Conversations | Titles and the messages themselves |
| Folders | Folder names, and the contents of one you open |
| Memories | Titles and bodies |
Three things worth knowing:
- Conversation search reaches into messages. If you remember what an agent told you but not which chat it was in, search the phrase itself.
- Quotes,
or, and-all work."exit ticket"for an exact phrase,rubric or checklistto widen,assessment -summativeto exclude. - Put the words you'd search for in the title. Titles and content are searched; the description field isn't.
What your agent can search
Ask "haven't I already written a rubric for something like this?" and the agent goes looking while you stay in the conversation, then answers with a link to what it found.
An agent can search:
- Your documents — and it finds more than the search box does, for the reason below
- Your conversations
- Your memories
- TeamTeacher's guides and documentation
- Curriculum knowledge bases
- The web
Words vs. concepts
Your documents get indexed two ways.
By word. Every term you wrote, reduced to its root, so "assessing" and "assessment" match each other. This finds what you literally typed. The technical name for it is a sparse vector — a very long list with a slot for every possible word, where only the ones you actually used light up.
By concept. The same text also goes through a model that turns it into a list of numbers describing what it's about — a dense vector. Two texts on the same idea land near each other even with no words in common, so "how do I grade group work fairly" can find a document you called Collaborative project rubric.
Neither works on its own. Words miss paraphrases. Concepts miss exact labels — a code like RL.6.2 doesn't mean much by itself, so it sinks underneath conceptually similar standards. So both searches run, and the results are combined into one ranking.
The search boxes match words only. Agents search both ways. That's why asking often turns up something the box didn't.
Knowledge bases
Curriculum collections — Common Core, the IB programmes, NGSS, state standards, UDL — are TeamTeacher's material, not yours. Agents search them both ways too, and can narrow to a subject, grade band, or framework first, so a high-school question doesn't come back with elementary standards.
For what's in each one, see Getting the Most Out of Knowledge Bases.
What search won't do
- Only documents and memories can be searched by concept. Files, conversations, and spreadsheet cells match on words alone — so search the phrase you remember, not the idea.
- No single box searches everything. Each page searches its own kind of thing. Asking an agent is the closest thing to searching your whole account at once.
Everything you search is yours alone. Results never include anyone else's material, and nothing you write goes into the curriculum knowledge bases.