If you see this, something is wrong
First published on Wednesday, Mar 26, 2025 and last modified on Sunday, Feb 22, 2026
Browsing content is great; finding it is even better!
You can search content in Documents Live in several ways.
Since Documents Live is a web page, you can search for content using the integrated search function of your browser.
Documents Live content is regularly crawled, and you can search the site using the search bar below the menu that says "Search in Documents Live...".
Once your query is entered, you will be presented with a list of results. You can directly select one of the results or go to the dedicated search result page.
In edit mode, just above the document title, there is a search bar that works a bit differently. Instead of looking for text in the web page, it looks for content in the document model.
The document model is a structured, hierarchical representation of the document. Documents Live searches the document model for text content that matches the query when prompted. What it returns is completely different from what a browser search would return.
What is returned is a list of matches, each consisting of two lines
a breadcrumb that represents the object hierarchy above the match
an extract of the text where the match was found, with the match highlighted
The model search is useful when looking for data that is not visible in the web page render. Here are some examples of usages
search for a label: the search result will return where the label was found (and it is probably attached to the object itself)
search for math content
If the text is a parameter of a LaTeX command, the search will find it
Clicking on any segment of the breadcrumb will open the inline editor to the corresponding object.