Global Search
The Global Search is your central navigation hub, accessible from anywhere in the platform. It allows you to instantly find data products, issues, meetings, source systems, and users without navigating through menus.
Overview
You can open the search interface by pressing ⌘ K (Cmd+K) on your keyboard. This opens a modal window where you can start typing immediately. The search engine indexes major platform entities, ensuring that you can jump straight to the content you need.
Search Capabilities
Unified Results
The search results aggregate items from across your current space. You will see:
- Data Products: Tables, dashboards, and APIs, matched by name or description.
- Issues: Open and resolved tickets related to data quality or governance.
- Source Systems: Connected databases and platforms.
- Governance Meetings: Scheduled discussions and their notes.
- Users: Team members and their roles.
- Comments: Discussions and threaded comments across the platform.
- Contracts: Data contracts and SLAs.
- Teams: Team definitions and memberships.
- Master Data: Managed reference datasets.
Search Modes
Qarion supports three search modes that control how queries are matched:
| Mode | Description |
|---|---|
| Auto (default) | Uses keyword search and automatically enriches results with semantic matches when AI embeddings are configured |
| Keyword | Full-text keyword search using Elasticsearch (with PostgreSQL fallback). Supports fuzzy matching for typos. |
| Semantic | Vector-similarity search using AI embeddings. Finds results by meaning rather than exact keywords. |
When to use each mode
- Auto works best for most users — it combines keyword precision with semantic understanding.
- Keyword is ideal when you know the exact name or term you're looking for. It supports fuzzy matching, so
custmerstill findscustomer. - Semantic excels at intent-based queries like "tables about customer spending patterns" where the exact keywords might not appear in the metadata.
Semantic search requires an embedding backend to be configured. Qarion defaults to the local backend (sentence-transformers) which works out of the box without external API calls.
Keyword Search Details
Keyword search uses weighted field scoring for relevance ranking:
| Field | Weight |
|---|---|
| Name / Title | High |
| Description | Medium |
| Tags | Medium |
| Documentation | Low |
Results include highlighted matches so you can quickly see why each result was returned.
Organization-Wide Search
In addition to space-scoped search, Qarion supports organization-wide search that aggregates results across all spaces you have access to. This is useful for cross-space data discovery.
Filtering and Navigation
Results appear as you type. You can navigate the list using the Up and Down arrow keys and press Enter to jump directly to the selected item. If you need to refine your search, try using specific keywords unique to the item you are looking for.
Keyboard Shortcuts
- Open Search:
⌘ K - Navigate Results:
↑/↓ - Select Item:
Enter - Close Search:
Escape
Best Practices
For the fastest workflow, get into the habit of using ⌘ K as your primary way to move around the application. It is significantly faster than clicking through the sidebar navigation. If you are looking for a specific data product, typing a unique part of its name or its domain tag will often bring it to the top of the results.
For intent-based discovery — when you know what kind of data you need but not its exact name — try switching to semantic mode or rely on the default auto mode, which blends both approaches.