WhatsApp starts rolling out new in-chat search button on iOS
Button appears when scrolling up Early last month, WhatsApp started testing a new search button in the bottom-right corner of the in-chat interface, making it easier to start a search. Up until now, in-chat search required users to tap on the contact or group name at the top of the conversation, select the search option from the chat info screen, and then enter their query after being taken back to the main chat. An in-chat search button, by contrast, streamlines the process by letting users start searching without leaving the conversation.
- ▪Button appears when scrolling up Early last month, WhatsApp started testing a new search button in the bottom-right corner of the in-chat interface, making it easier to start a search.
- ▪Up until now, in-chat search required users to tap on the contact or group name at the top of the conversation, select the search option from the chat info screen, and then enter their query after being taken back to the main chat.
- ▪An in-chat search button, by contrast, streamlines the process by letting users start searching without leaving the conversation.
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| Original publisher | 9to5Mac |
| Canonical URL | https://9to5mac.com/2026/09/17/whatsapp-starts-rolling-out-new-in-chat-search-button-on-ios/ |
| Publication time | Fri, 18 Sep 2026 01:41:34 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-18T01:43:45.060Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-18T01:43:45.060Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | S3nLtzG1jXhj · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
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