Threads keyword search rules: why can't I find a post? (web app)

This page explains how keywords are matched in Search in the Throk web app. To jump straight to examples, see Search examples: does searching “AI” find “paid”?.

Inspiration matches by meaning, so the rules on this page don’t apply to it.

In short

Each keyword is treated as one whole phrase: a post is found only if its text contains that phrase. What counts as “contains” depends on the language:

Language	How it’s matched	Found	Not found
Chinese	Character by character; the characters must be next to each other	`蛋白` → 高蛋白質早餐	`減脂` → 減少脂肪
English posts	By word, case-insensitive; singular, plural and other word forms match each other	`app` → apps, App Store	`AI` → OpenAI
English and numbers in other posts	Whole words, case-insensitive	`AI` → AI設計, #ai, 用 AI 寫文案	`AI` → paid, Taiwan, OpenAI; `app` → apps
Japanese (kanji, hiragana)	Same as Chinese, character by character	`お金` → お金持ち	—
Japanese (katakana)	Whole katakana words	`コーヒー` → コーヒーを飲む	`コーヒー` → アイスコーヒー
Korean	Whole words separated by spaces	`꿀팁` → 오늘의 꿀팁	`꿀팁` → 꿀팁을 공유

Chinese: character by character

Every character in a Chinese keyword must appear in the post in order and next to each other.

減脂 (cutting fat) finds “減脂餐” and “我在減脂”
減脂 doesn’t find “減少脂肪” (the characters aren’t next to each other)
蛋白 (egg white / protein) also finds “蛋白質” (protein), because those two characters do appear together in it

A few details that are easy to miss:

Traditional and Simplified Chinese don’t match each other. 減肥 doesn’t find “减肥”. To find both, search each one.
Punctuation and spaces are ignored. 減脂 also finds text like “減，脂” or “減脂”, where punctuation or a space sits between the characters.
A single character matches very broadly. 貓 (cat) finds every post containing “貓”, including “熊貓” (panda) and “貓咪” (kitty). Use at least two characters.

English and numbers: by word

English doesn’t look for “these letters somewhere in the text”. It matches by word, and it’s case-insensitive.

coffee, Coffee and COFFEE return the same results
AI finds “AI設計”, “#AI” and “AI-generated”: English right next to Chinese, in a hashtag or before a hyphen still counts as a separate word
AI doesn’t find “paid”, “said” or “Taiwan”, nor “OpenAI” or “ChatGPT”, because each of those is a whole word of its own
gram doesn’t find “Instagram” or “Telegram”

For a keyword made of several English words, the words must appear in order: work from home finds “Work From Home 一年心得”, but not “#workfromhome” written as one word. If a name can be written several ways, search each one.

English posts

When the post language is English, each word in the keyword and the post is reduced to its base form before matching:

Singular, plural and other word forms match each other: app also finds “apps”, and post also finds “posts” and “posting”.
Common words such as the, a and of are ignored, so they don’t affect matching.

English in Chinese, Japanese and Korean posts

English inside Chinese, Japanese and Korean posts matches whole words, and singular, plural and tenses aren’t merged: app doesn’t find “apps”.

Japanese

Kanji and hiragana: Same as Chinese, character by character. お金 (money) finds “お金持ち” (rich person).
Katakana: Matched by whole katakana word. コーヒー (coffee) finds “コーヒーを飲む” and “コーヒー豆” (the katakana word ends there), but not “アイスコーヒー” (iced coffee) or “コーヒーショップ” (coffee shop), because each of those is one longer katakana word.

To cover compound words, search the common combinations too, for example コーヒー, アイスコーヒー and コーヒーショップ.

Korean

Korean is matched by whole words separated by spaces. In Korean, particles attach directly to the end of nouns, so:

꿀팁 (handy tip) finds “오늘의 꿀팁” and “꿀팁!”
꿀팁 doesn’t find “꿀팁을 공유합니다” or “꿀팁이”: 꿀팁을 and 꿀팁이 are each a whole word of their own

Search the common particle forms separately, for example 꿀팁, 꿀팁을, 꿀팁이 and 꿀팁은.

One phrase per search

Everything in the search box is treated as one phrase, and spaces don’t mean “or”: entering 減脂減肥 only finds posts where “減脂減肥” appears in that order.

To cover several spellings, search each one separately, or ask Throk Agent to query several keywords at once, for example “Find trending posts from the past week for AI, OpenAI and 人工智慧”.

Hashtags

A post’s hashtags are searched along with its text, and you don’t need to type #: 減脂 and #減脂 return the same results. A post tagged “減脂” is found even if the text itself doesn’t say “減脂”.

Which posts are searched

Chinese, English, Japanese and Korean posts. Posts in other languages aren’t searched.
Replies are searched too. Results include both top-level posts and replies. Use the “Is reply” column in the export to tell them apart.
Post languages: choose Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Cantonese, English, Japanese or Korean, the same options as the Post language setting in the header. Each search only finds posts in the language you chose.

Search time range

Search covers the last 7 days by default. Paid plans can pick dates up to 30 days back. The Free plan is fixed to the last 7 days.

How fresh are likes and replies

The likes and replies in search results are the numbers from the last time Throk fetched that post. New posts and posts going viral are updated more often. Older or less popular posts are updated less often, so their numbers may be lower than what you see on Threads. Open the post or account details page to see live numbers.