Search
A single search surface across every entity in your organization — items, meetings, comments, bodies, attachments, and (for staff) people and wiki pages. Open it from the sidebar bar, the top-right icon on the public portal, or with ⌘K / Ctrl+K from anywhere.
What's Searched
| Entity | Indexed fields |
|---|---|
| Items | Title (highest weight), recommended action, description |
| Meetings | Title, location, header text |
| Comments | Author name, comment body |
| Bodies | Name, description, slug |
| Attachments | Filename, description, extracted body text for PDF / DOCX / CSV uploads |
| People (staff-only) | Name, email |
| Wiki pages (staff-only) | Title, body |
Search uses full-text search, so words match after lowercasing and stemming — typing meetings finds meeting, running finds run. Matched terms are highlighted in yellow in the result snippets.
Filters
Click + Filter in the search panel to narrow results. Filters stack — adding more than one narrows things further (they combine with AND).
| Filter | Scope |
|---|---|
| Date | Filter by Meeting date, Created, or Updated with presets (Today / Last 7 days / Last 30 days / Last 90 days / This year) or a custom range |
| Item type | Multi-select; e.g. only Public Hearings + Action Items |
| Body | Items / meetings tied to a specific body |
| Department (staff) | Items owned by a department |
| Owner (staff) | Items with a specific staff owner |
| Approver (staff) | Items where this person still owes a pending approval (already-approved items are excluded — this is a queue view) |
| Archived only (staff) | Show archived items / meetings instead of hiding them |
Active filters appear as dismissable pills above the result list. Click a pill to edit; click ✕ to remove. With two or more filters, a Clear all link appears.
Keyboard Shortcuts
| Action | Key |
|---|---|
| Open search | ⌘K / Ctrl+K / / |
| Close | Esc |
| Move between results | ↑ / ↓ |
| Open the highlighted result | Enter |
Privacy and Visibility
Search respects the same visibility rules as the rest of the app — what you see in search is what you'd see browsing normally. Specifically:
- Public visitors see only published items, announced (not cancelled) meetings, and bodies marked public. Drafts, unpublished items, and private bodies never appear.
- Confidential items (e.g. closed-session matters) appear in search the same way they appear on the agenda — title visible, other details hidden for non-admin viewers. Noticing law requires the public agenda show them; search matches that behavior.
- Public comment search removes the submitter's email and address from results. Staff see the full record.
- Separate organizations — search only ever returns results from the org you're searching. There's no cross-organization index.
- People search is staff-only. Public visitors cannot reach it; staff can find anyone in their organization by name or email.
- Wiki search is staff-only. Wiki pages are an internal knowledge layer and never surface on the public portal.
Search is rate-limited to prevent automated scraping. Normal interactive use is well below the cap; you'd only hit it with a script.
Document Text Search
When staff upload a PDF, DOCX, or CSV attachment, Livy pulls out the plain text and indexes it alongside the filename and description. Searching for any phrase in a document's body surfaces the item it's attached to. The extracted text is capped at 1 MB per attachment (more than enough for typical agenda packets).
Encrypted PDFs, scanned image-only PDFs, and unsupported formats fall back to searching just the filename and description. The upload itself never fails — if text extraction doesn't work, it fails quietly.
Tips
- Search is fast at any scale. Type two characters to start.
- Quote phrases for exact matches:
"public hearing"is different frompublic hearing— the quoted version requires those words to appear together. - Use + Filter → Approver with your own name to find your pending-approval queue, or with someone else's name to see what's still on their plate.
- Use + Filter → Date → Created to find recently-added items regardless of when their meeting takes place.
Related
- Permissions & Roles — who can search what
- Comments — how PII is stripped in comment snippets
- Attachments — supported file formats
- Announcing Meetings — why confidential item titles appear publicly