Slack search is useless — you cannot find a message someone sent you 3 weeks ago

You know someone sent you a specific message in Slack about a deployment issue roughly 3 weeks ago. You remember some keywords. You search for them. Slack returns 200+ results sorted by some opaque relevance algorithm, mostly from public channels, none of which are the message you want. You add the person's name as a filter — now you get 0 results because Slack's search doesn't handle the combination of sender + keyword + time range correctly. You scroll through your DM history manually for 15 minutes. So what? Slack is the primary knowledge base of every modern company, but it is unsearchable. Decisions, context, links, specs — all buried in threads that nobody can find again. Teams re-discuss the same topics because nobody can locate the previous conversation. New hires have zero access to institutional context because Slack search is broken. Why does this persist in the first place? Slack indexes messages as flat text, not as structured conversations with participants, topics, decisions, and references. Their search algorithm optimizes for recent messages in popular channels, not for the specific needle-in-a-haystack retrieval that people actually need. And Slack has no business incentive to fix this — they charge per seat, not per search quality, and switching costs are enormous.