Client-side search for E2E

[ara4n]

Server-side search for E2E isn't happening anytime soon. We should consider our options for client-side search, though. Rather than paginating in history, decrypting it, and searching clientside, perhaps we should finally finish the localstorage history store in js-sdk (which would also then speed up reloads...)

[arxcode]

Maybe it would make sense in the meantime to display at least a helpful message to users trying to search an encrypted room? All you get right now is "No results", which is confusing to people who do not know the technical background. Something like "Search is not available for encrypted rooms."?

[kannes]

Having a message would definitely help... Also please add a warning to the message box when one turns on a room's encryption. Discovering this months later sucks.

[hukaze]

The warning at enablment would be huge.. When we built our first servers some time ago we literally rebuilt them multiple times thinking that the search had somehow broken along the way.. Only now, ages later, do we discover that this is a natural behavior.. Also, don't mean to ask the unanswerable but.. Any idea when this will be a functional ability both at the client and the server?

[t3chguy]

I am currently tasked with a generic search daemon, which you'll be able to run client-side and it'll offer e2e search.

[adrianog]

Is there a roadmap? Next milestone / alpha quality build?

[ara4n]

so the daemon exists over at https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-search. however, it's experimental still; we need to do the work to get it hooked into riot nicely (e.g. by bundling it with riot/desktop).

An alternate approach here could be for clients to slowly download full e2e history in the background and decrypt and index it themselves (potentially uploading encrypted indexes to the server to speed up the operation).

[MountainX]

https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-search is showing no updates for 9 months. Has the roadmap changed? Last fall it seemed client side search of E2E rooms would be part of the Riot 1.0 release.

[jryans]

The feature of E2E search is still quite high on the Riot roadmap. We weren't able to have it ready for Riot 1.0, but it's clear that some form of search in E2E rooms is required before we can make E2E rooms the default mode. The Riot team is actively planning our post-1.0 roadmap, so we should have more timing details to share soon.

[MountainX]

The feature of E2E search is still quite high on the Riot roadmap. ... The Riot team is actively planning our post-1.0 roadmap, so we should have more timing details to share soon.

Hi. We're looking for an update on E2E search. It's been 6-7 months since last comment here. Hope to know more details. Thank you. Riot is the best.

[SharkyRawr]

I just ran in to this, using matrix/riot with my own homeserver as an alternative to Telegram and other IMs. Search yielded "No results" whatever the search term was, in a conversation that's been E2E encrypted since the beginning. Took me a while to connect the dots. 🤣

Searching your messages, encrypted or not, is really a fundamental feature that I'm missinga lot -- but I also understand that it's difficult to implement without breaking something because of the current architecture.

In the mean time a warning or explanation "cannot search encrypted rooms" in Riot (or synapse?) would be really appreciated while the feature is still being worked on (being planned? whats the status?).

[flooguu]

This is insane... the text is right there on my screen, yet i can not find a message even from yesterday? Is there absolutely no way to do a client-side search on a best effort basis... this is a huge drawback for 3 years now. And there is not even a sensible error message, just 'no results'.

[jryans]

The latest news is that search in encrypted rooms will be included as part of the cross-signing / E2E by default for DMs release coming up in a few weeks. It will only be available in Riot Desktop initially, as it requires native components that can't easily be wired up in the web version.

If you are feeling adventurous, you can try out the feature right now by building Riot Desktop with it enabled.