In our digital world, WhatsApp is just as much a way of life as a computer. It’s become a social media platform used by business and personal contacts alike. The mobile app is good for quick messaging while the larger screen of WhatsApp Web enables users to start typing or multitasking from afar. Yet one of the most underused features of WhatsApp’s desktop version is the amazing search functionality. Put simply, if you ever need to find a specific message or contact, you should always use the web version. Here are five reasons why.
1. Unmatched Speed and Performance
Let’s be honest: it’s a pretty hard task to search for a certain word or link in a long group chat on your phone without waiting long periods of time. The mobile app is typically too small to index and sort the billions of bytes of data in it fast enough, resulting in a latency or just some intermittent hangs of the app. On the other hand when you search for the Web version on your desktop, you’re actually using your computer’s processor. Modern browsers and computers have been made to process pretty complex data queries very quickly. The result is that the search takes almost no time, arrives at your screen as you type it in, and even has a lot less frustration when things get busy.
2. A Comprehensive and Clear Overview
The mobile search feature usually lets you view results in a very limited number of result categories, and then require you to tap on each to see its context. This can be confusing when it comes to knowing what conversations have been sent/responded to the message you’ve found. On WA Web the search results are presented in a much more-intuitive panel. When you search within WhatsApp Web, the results appear on the left and by tapping any of them, you immediately open the full chat (conversation, before & after). This gives you immediate context. It’s very much like seeing why that particular message was sent (and what it was responding to).
3. Superior Multitasking Capabilities
This might be the largest benefit. With the click of a button on your mobile device, searching in WhatsApp is an increasingly important task. You’re limited to staying in the app itself; and if you want to do something with the information you find—typically copying an address to a email or checking a link against a document—you have to keep switching between applications at all times. Once you decide to search across the web for that information you need in real time on your desktop, you open up a door to true multitasking. If you keep your WhatsApp Web tab open alongside your email client, a spreadsheet, or a project management tool, you can actually find and use information in a natural way.
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4. Precision Filtering for Targeted Results
While both platforms have filtering mechanisms available (by photos, links, videos, etc. ) the experience on the desktop is, hands down, more precise and intuitive. Being on a bigger screen means you’re applying, removing filter conditions swiftly and without much effort. Need to find that PDF your boss sent you last month? On a big screen you can quickly filter out documents and then browse through all your chats to see if you can find a keyword in any of these files. That combination of media filters and keyword search, on a big screen allows for something of a surgical precision that’s impossible to replicate on a tiny touchscreen, allowing you to get exactly what you need without much effort.
5. Easier Data Management and Export
Sometimes finding a message is not the whole deal. Sometimes you just need to get a little something out of the message. Like maybe you want to copy and paste a really long text clipping, save a bunch of messages for later use, or gather information from various chats. If you want to do any of those things on your phone it takes a lot of time. After you take the time to search for the messages using the web version and find what you want, using the mouse and keyboard you can pretty much pick and choose, copy and paste large amounts of text into any other program that has text in it. The ability to right-click the message and save directly to a folder in your computer is another big time saver that the mobile app does not even come close to.
Conclusion: Make Desktop Your Search Hub
Next time you scroll to the last bit of information you need buried inside a chat of some kind on your phone and spend multiple occassions trying to find it, think again. When you decide to search the web version of WhatsApp instead of the mobile version, you are not doing just a simple search. You are going to searching for a faster, clearer, and more powerful experience that is going to work for you as part of the workflow you need to be using, when it is necessary. So turn an everyday task into an efficient one, and remember why when it comes to serious communication management, the desktop version is everything.
