Search the Handbook
Once your Handbook has more than a couple of dozen procedures, browsing the category tree starts to slow you down. The search bar is the faster path.
1. Open the Handbook
Go to Handbook in the main navigation.
2. Click the search bar
The search bar sits at the top of the page. Its placeholder text reads Search handbook…
3. Type the term
Type the term you’re looking for. The procedure list filters in real time as you type. No need to press Enter.
What search looks at
The Handbook search matches against three things on each procedure:
- The title.
- The category the procedure lives in.
- The keywords you added when writing the procedure (up to 10 per procedure).
It does not search the procedure body. This is intentional — searching bodies would surface false positives (“this procedure briefly mentions chargebacks”) on procedures that aren’t actually about chargebacks.
If you can’t find a procedure that exists, two fixes:
- Add the missing term to the procedure’s keywords field. Useful for internal jargon, error codes, synonyms.
- Rename the procedure to match what you’d actually search for.
Searching for variations
The search is case-insensitive and matches partial terms. refund finds refunds, refunding, and refund-policy. You don’t need to be exact.
For multi-word searches, every word has to match somewhere across title / category / keywords. vip refund finds a procedure titled “VIP refund flow” but not one titled “VIP onboarding” with refund only in the body.
Clearing search
Delete what’s in the search bar and the list returns to the full category-grouped view.
Search vs. AI retrieval
The Handbook search bar is for humans writing or editing procedures. It’s different from how the AI uses Handbook content:
- You searching the Handbook hits titles, categories, and keywords directly. Exact, fast, predictable.
- AI agents retrieving from the Handbook use a different mechanism — they read every procedure’s content, scope rules, and confidential flag, and surface the right procedure based on what’s happening in the conversation. They don’t go through the search bar.
This means the keywords field has two jobs: helping you find procedures from the search bar, and helping the AI retrieve the right procedure when a customer message mentions a synonym. Stack both purposes — common customer terms, internal jargon, error codes, all in keywords.
Common gotchas
- The search misses a procedure whose body mentions the term. Search doesn’t read bodies. Add the term to keywords.
- Spelling matters. A common misspelling won’t match the correctly-spelled keyword. Add a few common misspellings to keywords for high-traffic procedures.
- No saved searches. Searches are session-scoped — reload and you start fresh.