I actually think it's fair to say the chat search in Teams is basically unusable. You can search them, sure, but it only finds single chat messages with no way to go to that message to read the context around it. So, if the chat message you find has the word you wanted but not the information, then you're basically out of luck unless you keep guessing words and find the message with what you wanted.

I think I understand why it works this way too. If you search _channels_, then the search will show the messages with that word but link you to the entire conversation that message appears in. But for chats, each individual message is basically treated like it's own conversation and thus search only displays the single message with no context.

A quick Google suggests I'm not alone in this criticism, and it's been a problem for even longer than I've been using Teams (a year or two): https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams/teams...