Search

Searchable sources

Search matches words in the text Overshow has captured or imported with your permission. It runs against the encrypted database on your computer.

Source	What you can find
Screen text	Words captured from allowed applications, including visible documents, browser pages and error messages
UI snapshots	Text and labels read through accessibility capture
Meeting transcripts	Speech transcribed locally from meetings recorded on the Mac
Connected mail	Bounded excerpts and metadata from email accounts you have authorised

Watched-folder document indexing and automatic meeting question detection are unavailable in this release. A document can still contribute visible text through screen capture. Search finds only material that was captured or imported and remains inside your permitted history window.

Matching

Full-text search works best with distinctive terms from the source: a name, error code, ticket ID, project name or phrase. Search also applies stemming where supported, so some word variations can match.

The default search combines a strict text match with a broader match when the query is suitable. The broader pass can find passages containing some of the useful terms even when a strict match is sparse. Results are combined and deduplicated before display. A single distinctive term stays on the strict path.

Search does not use text embeddings in the shipping build. It does not promise to find a passage solely because it expresses the same idea in different words. If a query misses relevant material, try words the source used and narrow the app or time range.

Filters

Filter	Use
Time range	Limit the capture dates to the period you remember
App or window	Narrow screen captures to the application or window title
Content type	Choose the source types relevant to your query
Meeting	Review evidence from one meeting
Speaker or profile	Narrow eligible results to a linked person
Browser URL	Find text captured from a particular site or page
Length range	Limit results by the length of their stored text

Available filters depend on the source and the surface you are using. Speaker filters require labelled transcript segments. Meeting retrieval is audio-only unless meeting screen context is enabled. Mail retains its account, sender and recipient restrictions when applicable.

Results

Each result includes its source, capture time and matched text. Open the source to inspect the stored passage and nearby context. A capture timestamp tells you when Overshow recorded the text, which may differ from the date of the event described in it.

Results are paged. On API requests, Auto and Natural use the same lexical retrieval and can return an opaque pagination.next_cursor. Keyword uses strict full-text search with offset pagination. A Natural response may report semantic_fallback = "semantic_not_built", because shipping builds have no semantic retrieval. This is expected for any non-empty query on a supported source type.

Ask

Ask retrieves local evidence and produces an answer with source references. On the Mac it uses the on-device language model, and on Windows it uses an AI provider you set up. Search remains useful without a language model. Check citations before relying on an answer.

Better queries

• Start with a few words likely to appear in the source.
• Keep exact identifiers, names and error messages intact.
• Add a date or app filter when a term appears across many captures.
• Try another source term when the first query finds nothing.
• Use Sources or Timeline to inspect nearby captures when you remember when the work happened.

No results means no matching evidence was found in the permitted local corpus. It does not establish that an event never happened.