memex
Knowledge Base

How to Search All Your Old AI Conversations in One Place

Memex·6 min

Short answer: each assistant can only search its own chats, and usually not very well. To search everything at once, export your history from each assistant, load the exports into one archive such as Memex, and search there. You can also hand the archive to an AI and let it do the searching.

Why you cannot find that old answer

Most people who rely on AI assistants hit the same wall a few months in. You know you solved a problem before. You remember roughly when. You cannot find it. There are three reasons:

  1. Titles are auto-generated. "Python help" or "Quick question" tells you nothing six months later.
  2. Built-in search is limited to one product. Results can be hard to scan when you have hundreds of similar conversations, and there are few ways to filter them.
  3. You used a different assistant. The answer might be in Claude while you are searching ChatGPT, or in a Gemini chat from your phone.

The third one is the real problem. Today, no assistant searches another vendor's history for you.

What good AI-history search looks like

A useful search over your AI conversations should:

  • Search the full text of every message, not only titles.
  • Cover every assistant you use, in one index.
  • Filter by date and source, so "the Claude chat about invoices from last spring" is findable.
  • Open the whole conversation, in order, with the surrounding context.
  • Be readable by an AI, so an assistant can do the searching and synthesis for you.

Setting it up with Memex

  1. Export your history from each assistant: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini. DeepSeek and WhatsApp exports are supported too.
  2. Upload the exports to Memex. Each one is parsed and added to the same archive.
  3. Search. Use the search page, or browse by timeline to find conversations from a specific week.
  4. Keep it fresh with the Memex Capture extension, which sends new prompts from ChatGPT, Claude and DeepSeek to your archive as you chat.

Letting an AI search for you

The most powerful way to search your history is to not do it yourself. Your Memex link serves your archive as Markdown with a search parameter, so any assistant that can fetch a URL can:

  1. search your archive for the topic you asked about,
  2. open the most relevant conversations,
  3. and answer using what you actually said and decided back then.

For example, you can ask Claude: "Using my Memex, what were the three options I considered for the database migration, and which one did I pick?" The assistant looks it up instead of guessing.

For deeper integration, connect Memex as an MCP server, so search becomes a native tool in Claude and other MCP clients.

Search that improves over time

Memex has one more feature that ordinary search does not: breadcrumbs. When an AI finds a conversation useful, it leaves a short note saying which question it answered and how helpful it was. Over time, the archive learns which conversations matter most, and the next assistant can start from the most helpful ones instead of searching from scratch. Read more in AI breadcrumbs: how assistants learn from your past conversations.

Privacy

Your archive is not public. It is reachable through your signed-in account, or through a token-gated link that you create and can revoke at any time. Links are read-only by default. The Memex Capture extension uses write-only device tokens, so a device that sends captures cannot read your archive back.