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. You may access the full list of our advanced search filters by selecting Explore All Search Terms and you'll see that the search suggestions are customized based on your Clay data, so you see examples that are relevant to you.

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
• By Interaction
  • emailCount:<2
  • lastText:>2021
• 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.

ℹ️ When you sort search results by relevance, Clay prioritizes results in the following order:

• Top results: Your closest contacts (highest relationship score) who directly match your search keyword
• Secondary results: Your other close contacts who have content related to your search query
• Additional results: Remaining contacts with lower relationship scores who match your search criteria

For example, if you search for "design," you'll first see your closest contacts who have "design" specifically mentioned in their profile. Next, you'll see other close connections with related design content. Finally, you'll see less connected contacts who match your design query.

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 group noteDate company org location created updatedfirstMet 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 group:none

ℹ️ When combining multiple search terms, Clay uses "AND" logic by default. This means all terms must be present for a result to appear. For example, searching "marketing director" will only show contacts who match both "marketing" and "director."

We don't currently support "OR" logic that would show results matching either term but we're working on expanding our search capabilities in future updates!