Hi, I’m Ben, an engineer who has been working on search at Coda for the last few years.
One improvement also included in the launch is that hidden page titles and canvas content will no longer be visible in search results by default unless the searcher activates “show hidden pages” in the docs’ three-dot menu. While hidden pages should not be considered a security feature, we hope this change will help make hidden pages less discoverable in search and reduce scenarios of folks ending up somewhere they shouldn’t (a clear pain point we heard when we announced the beta).
With that said, table content on hidden pages will still be visible. We want to be more thoughtful in the solution here, as there are cases when you would want to see table content on a hidden page, e.g. there is a base table of all teams’ tasks on a hidden page, with views of that table on visible pages for each respective team, and someone wants to search for a specific task for their team.
On a broader note, I want to extend our biggest thanks to all of our beta testers for the improved in-doc search experience. Your feedback has been incredibly helpful, and our team read everything that came in, both from the public post and beta feedback form. This is an exciting milestone that builds upon the years of improvements that paved the way for this launch:
- In 2023, we made it possible to search across “all docs” directly from in-doc search as well as launching a number of improvements to matching and ranking in global search.
- In 2024, we added table content to global search in response to your feedback — a daunting engineering effort given the amount of table data available in Coda.
- And now we’ve simplified search whether within a doc or globally. Today’s launch gives you more real estate to search-and-filter your results and rolls out refined matching-and-ranking abilities.
At the same time, we hear and understand the desire for greater options to manage content visibility and access. While it’s not the focus of this current improvement, here are some things that we’re currently working on and thinking about:
- More search controls: Deeper customization and flexibility over search settings for app-like use cases, such as disabling the search bar.
- Protecting tables from unintended edits: Table and column locking, which will allow you to prevent changes to a table’s configuration and values consistently from all entry points across a doc.
- Ability to restrict which content different users have access to in a doc: Introducing new patterns including personal sync tables where different users can load different data into a doc, and over time more direct control on the visibility of different pages, rows, and columns within a doc.
This launch is the continuation of years of work at Coda, and as always, we welcome your feedback along the way. If you spot any issues, bugs, or have any ideas, feel free to use this form to send that feedback right to the product team.