On-premise chat is no longer a place where employees message each other “OK” and “Got you”. Every day, MyChat manages agreements, files, bill numbers, links, technical details, manager decisions, support responses, and discussions in private and group dialogues. The more a company uses chat, the more valuable its history becomes. However, it is only relevant when you can use a quick search.
That is why we are preparing an instant full-text search in the MyChat chat server. It processes millions of your sent messages. In upcoming versions, it will be available for both commercial and free MyChat servers.
What will change?
The search will work on the MyChat server right after installation. You won’t need a separate search server like Elasticsearch or Postgres. No need for manual history relocation, additional configuration, or complicated migration. After the update is complete, MyChat itself prepares the search index in the background. Perhaps, you won’t even notice these changes.
An especially important thing: new messages have a higher priority in the search index. Even if a server is still processing an old history, you will be able to find the latest discussions.
The search is Unicode-compatible, which means that it’s easier to work with messages written in different languages. This is crucial for an enterprise chat: real-time messaging often contains various languages, surnames, company names, document numbers, and technical terms.
Real cases of time management
1. Find an agreement that was “definitely mentioned somewhere”
For example, in the sales department conference, people discussed discounts for customers. One month passed, and an accountant asked: ” Who agreed to this, and what are the conditions?” Instead of manually scrolling through history, you can find a phrase, a customer’s last name, a bill number or a piece of text. MyChat will show a required fragment, and an employee can quickly restore the context.
2. Find a file by name quickly
In corporate chat, files are sent directly to dialogues: contracts, certificates, templates, images, and guides. Full-text search will work not only with regular text messages, but with related content too: file names, images, links, replies, and other message types. You do not remember who sent “bill_final_may.xlsx”? It is enough to recall a part of the name, and the chat will find the rest.
3. Search by a part of a word or an item number
Usually, you do not remember a full phrase. Sometimes all you have is a piece of text (usually inaccurate), a part of a serial number, a part of a file name, or a middle part of a long technical term. For this, the search uses N-grams: no digging into technical details, but the point is simple — MyChat can find not only the beginning of the word, but fragments inside text too. This is especially helpful for warehouses, service departments, production companies, tech support, and all who work with application numbers, invoices, contracts, and equipment.
Moreover, the search is smart enough to find “John Doe” even if you search for “Джон” in Cyrillics, and “François García” just by “Francois” or “Гарсіа”.
4. Recall an old tech support incident
Someone complains: “We’ve got that connection error again.” A support team member recalls a similar issue being discussed in the administrators’ group chat. Searching by error code, server name, IP address, or a phrase from the message will quickly find the old solution, saving the team from hours of troubleshooting.
5. Onboarding a new employee
A new team member joins the department and asks, “Why do we do it this way?” In the past, the answer usually depended on a colleague’s memory or an internal forum with tech roadmaps. While that works, it’s much better to actually find the original discussion where the decision was made — to see which group chat it was in, who participated, what the arguments were, and what files were attached. MyChat’s history essentially becomes the company’s working memory.
6. Concurrent searching with zero queues
In large organizations, multiple people might need to search for something at the exact same time: accounting is looking for documents, tech support is tracking down an error, a manager is tracing a project discussion, and the security team is hunting for threats 🙂 For servers handling hundreds of connections, this is a standard workflow. To process this correctly, the server uses parallel reading technology, meaning search queries from different clients don’t have to wait in the same line. Multiple users can search simultaneously, and the server processes their requests at the same time.
No manual settings and hard launch
We know that a corporate server can’t just be put on pause for the sake of a new feature — especially large servers with years of chat history. That’s why importing your existing history into the search index happens automatically and seamlessly. MyChat will keep running as usual, users can continue messaging, and new texts will be indexed with the highest priority.
The older history will gently catch up in the background.
According to our estimates, the full-text search database file will be roughly 2 to 2.5 times larger than your main history database (history.db). For instance, an average database containing 1.2 million messages weighs around 450 MB. The full-text search index will add another ~900 MB of storage space on your server. It’s not too much, but you should keep this crucial detail in mind if you are renting a VPS or VDS server with limited disk space.
Access security is still important
Search shouldn’t reveal unnecessary information. Users should only find what they have access to: their private conversations and currently available conferences. Full-text search in MyChat is designed as a backend to the overall history system, not as a separate “copy of everything for everyone.” We also take into account that if people delete or edit messages, the search index also “understands” this and quickly updates everything.
Want to try it earlier than others?
We’re preparing a beta test of full-text search in MyChat.
If you actively use message history, store work files in MyChat, discuss projects, requests, clients, deliveries, or internal regulations, you’ll definitely be interested in trying out the new search on real data. We’re offering a special bonus for beta test participants: when you renew your MyChat license for one year, you’ll receive an additional six months of updates.
Submit a request to participate in the beta test, and we’ll contact you when the new version is ready for testing in your scenarios.