What is a group:GROUPNAME search?

AI-generated summary

A discussion about the group:GROUPNAME search feature revealed its functionality. Simon_Manning quoted pmusaraj stating that it targets regular non-PM topics associated with a group. JimPas clarified that these topics are regular group topics that only the group can access, but are not private messages.

However, Simon_Manning found that searching for group:team returned public topics created by team members, which contradicts the idea that only group members can access these topics. JammyDodger shared a similar experience, suggesting that group:team returns public posts from team members.

Simon_Manning further analyzed the code and concluded that group:GROUPNAME searches return any post created by a group member, ordered by relevance or latest activity. They proposed splitting this discussion into a separate topic to clarify the group: search functionality.

What is a non-PM topic associated with a group? A topic in which a member of the group participates? Created by a member of the group? Something else?

It’s a regular topic associated with the group and only the group can access, but is not a PM (PM topic).

If I search for group:team here on meta, I get various public topics in the results. (I’m not a member of team) It looked like they were all created by a member of team but I wasn’t sure if that was coincidental.

When I search group:team it gives me lots of Whisper posts.

Actually, that wasn’t strictly true. When I searched for group:team and a keyword it gave me lots of whisper posts, but just group:team gave me lots of posts from people in the Team group. I think (if I’m following it right) that eg, group:team gives you public posts from all the people in that group.

Looking at the code suggests that it is any post created by a member of the group. Ordered by relevance, for a non-member of team, seems to weight topics more heavily than replies.

Ordered by latest, I see replies and also notices like topic closures, etc.

Perhaps it would be good to split this chain into a separate topic about what a group: search is. Support category, asking what it is?