catalog / tool-behaviors

conversation_search is keyword-only; meta-words poison results

verified

conversation_search does keyword matching, not semantic search; meta-words like 'conversation' or 'chat' in your query poison the results and surface unrelated hits.

  • Category: tool-behaviors
  • Applies to: Claude.ai ✅ | Claude Code ❌ | Claude Desktop ❓
  • Verified on: Claude.ai web, 2026-05-17
  • Verification tier: verified
  • Severity: Silent semantic failure

Symptom

A skill that searches past chats for "what we discussed yesterday" returns plausible-looking but wrong chats — often from weeks or months prior.

Cause

conversation_search matches keywords literally — including meta-words like "discussed" or "yesterday" that describe the act of having a conversation rather than its content. Any past chat containing those literal tokens scores well.

Reproduction

Reproduced 2026-05-17 on Claude.ai web: query "discussed yesterday" returned chats from weeks and months prior, none of which were from yesterday.

Fix

Queries must contain *content nouns* from the original conversation, not words that describe the meta. "Discussed" and "yesterday" are meta; "Atlassian", "Lambda OutOfMemory", "Lighthouse ProductHub" are content. For time-windowed retrieval, use recent_chats instead.

Notes

For the cross-platform shape of past-chat search, see ../cross-platform/past-chat-search-three-shapes.md.