Search

Clay offers the most powerful person search available anywhere, allowing you to find anyone you know, by typing almost anything.

Clay’s Search is similar to Google, meaning you can just type regular phrases to find someone. Behind the scenes, Clay parses your search to understand who you’re looking for and gives you results in milliseconds.

Designing the world's best people search

Search is designed to help you find the broadest possible set of results, sorted by relevance and relationship. What does this mean in practice?

• Broad: We believe serendipity helps reinforce relationships, so we’d rather give you too many results that include the person you’re looking for, along with others you might not have thought of, instead of too few. To do this, we correct for typos and replace broad words—like 'NYC'—with other terms like New York, just in case someone uses an alternate phrase.
  • Multi-variable: We also search across your notes and every field Clay brings in, so you havethe largest chance for a successful match. Everything is assessed to present you with the right people.
• Relevance: Depending on your search term, Clay will prioritize particular fields over others. For example, a match for 'NYC' in someone’s location takes precedence over a match in their education.
• Relationship: Unlike other searches, Clay knows how you know someone. So people you’ve known forever will take precedence over people you only met once, for example.

Example terms

Because search understands regular phrases and sentences, there's no need for specific keywords or filters. Here’s a small sample of things you can search for:

• By Location

  • City Philadelphia Mountain View
  • State Michigan FL
  • Country France USA
  • Region Europe NYC Bay Area
• By Organization
  • Company name Apple Procter & Gamble
  • Employment type Freelance Self-Employed
  • Industry Fintech Fashion
• By Education
  • Institution UCLA École Polytechnique
  • Major Psychology Economics
  • Education Level Bachelors MBA PhD Postdoc
• By Interest
  • Hobbies Travel Woodworking Etsy
  • Publications Vogue The Atlantic
• By Twitter
  • Twitter followers People who follow me
  • Twitter following People I follow
  • People I follow and follow me back Mutual follows
  • Follower count people with 10k+ followers (options are 1k+, 10k+, and 100k+)
• By Integration
  • List of your Linkedin connections Linkedin connections
  • List of your Facebook friends Facebook friends
  • List of people you texted, if you have connected iMessage on Desktop texted messaged iMessage
  • List of people who have a phone number phone
  • List of people who were brought in from the iOS Contacts integration contacts Apple contact
• By Other Social Media
  • People who have a particular social media link on their profile Soundcloud Tumblr Github Pinterest Linkedin Facebook Twitter
• By Date
  • By particular time periods Last month Last quarter Last year
  • Broad time periods A while ago Recently
• By Relationship
  • By meetings People I've met once People I've never met
  • By email People I've emailed
  • By relationship closeness Close Closer Closest New
• Miscellaneous
  • Get a list of all your contacts all
  • List Clay members you know Clay members
  • People you've added to Clay manually manual
  • Upcoming reminders reminder
  • Filter for people who are starred starred

Sorting your results

Use Sort at the top right to rearrange the order of the results by relevance (default), name, or recency.

Advanced Search

In addition to regular Google-style search, there are some secret keywords that can help you write even more powerful queries. You can narrow your search terms with exact phrases, exclusions, wildcards, or even search in specific fields:

• Advanced search operators
  
  • Exact phrase "The New Yorker"
  • Exclude phrase paris -"investor” will show you people you know in Paris who are not investors
  • Wildcard phrases bio* will return biochem, bioinformatics, biomedical, etc.

• By Field
  • Field names name bio note noteDate company org location created firstMet lastMet firstEvent lastEvent firstEmail lastEmail firstText lastText messageCount emailCount meetingCount
  • Operators : :< :>
  • Examples name:jane org:"The Paris Review" firstMet:2019 lastText:>2021 firstEvent:2016-01