Snowflake Universal Search 101: Quickly locate your data (2026)

Manually searching for data in Snowflake often feels like hunting for a needle in a haystack, which is incredibly frustrating and time-consuming. Snowflake recognizes this difficulty and has created Universal Search to completely change the way you search for your data. Built on top of the powerful Snowflake Cortex, Universal Search lets you find database objects, Snowflake Marketplace listings, Snowflake documentation pages and Snowflake Community Knowledge Base articles from a single search bar inside Snowsight. If you’ve never used it, or if you set it up a while ago and haven’t kept up with what’s changed, this guide covers everything you need to know.

In this article, we’ll walk through how Universal Search works, what it can search, a step-by-step guide to using it and the limitations you should actually know about.

What is Snowflake Universal Search?

Snowflake Universal Search is a comprehensive search solution designed to enhance data discoverability and accessibility within the Snowflake ecosystem. Its primary purpose is to help users with the ability to quickly and efficiently locate Snowflake artifacts like Dashboards, Worksheets, Databases, Schemas, Tables, Views, User-defined functions (UDFs), Stored procedures, data products from the Snowflake Marketplace, Snowflake documentation and relevant Snowflake Community Knowledge Base articles.

Snowflake Universal Search’s major goal is to simplify data discovery by allowing users to conduct natural language searches. This means that you may search for anything by typing it in normal, natural English. This feature allows users to easily find information, even if their search terms are misspelled or incomplete.

Here is a TL;DR version of Snowflake Universal Search’s core capabilities:

• Object search: Locate tables, views, schemas, databases, worksheets, notebooks, ML models and more
• Marketplace search: Find data products in the Snowflake Marketplace or your Internal Marketplace
• Documentation search: Surface relevant pages from docs.snowflake.com
• Community knowledge search: Pull in relevant articles from the Snowflake Community Knowledge Base

Universal Search is currently available as an open preview to all Snowflake accounts, with the exception of Virtual Private Snowflake (VPS) and government cloud environments.

Technical breakdown: how Snowflake Universal Search actually works

Now, in this section, we will explain the technical integration, functionalities and user interface features that make Snowflake Universal Search an effective tool for data discovery.

Integration with Snowflake Cortex

Snowflake Universal Search runs on top of Snowflake Cortex. Cortex provides the infrastructure to run LLMs and natural language processing (NLP) models without shipping your data to external services. Snowflake also drew on technology from Neeva, a search engine company that Snowflake acquired in May 2023, to build the underlying search engine.

The key technical mechanism here is embedding-based ranking. When you type a query, a bi-encoder model converts both your search terms and the indexed object metadata into numerical vectors. The system then computes semantic similarity between these vectors to rank results. That’s why a search for “zip codes” can return a table named postal_code. The model understands semantic proximity, not just keyword overlap.

This is trained across a range of query types, from short single-word queries to longer, conversational natural language inputs. The result is a search engine that degrades gracefully. Even a partial or misspelled query tends to return something useful.

What Snowflake Universal Search actually indexes

Snowflake Universal Search searches metadata only. It does not scan the actual contents of your database objects. The metadata it indexes includes:

• Names: Object names and column names
• Comments: Comments attached to objects and columns
• Tags: Tags associated with objects and columns

So if you’re hoping to find a row containing a specific customer ID, Universal Search won’t help. It will help you find the table that’s likely to contain that data, based on how the object and its columns are described.

How access control works in search results

Results you see in Snowflake Universal Search are governed by your currently active role and any secondary roles. If your active role doesn’t have access to a database object, it won’t show up in your results by default.

There’s a newer capability worth knowing about here: OBJECT_VISIBILITY. Administrators can set this property on accounts, databases or schemas to make objects discoverable in Snowflake Universal Search even to users who don’t have explicit access. This is a preview feature and follows Snowflake’s inheritance model, meaning settings at the account level cascade down to databases and schemas unless explicitly overridden.

If an object is set to be discoverable but not accessible, it appears in Snowflake Universal Search results only (not in the database object explorer or SHOW commands). Users can then select Request Access to see contact information for the object owner, streamlining the access request process. This is particularly useful for large organizations where teams don’t always know what data assets exist.

OBJECT_VISIBILITY can be set to a YAML specification (to specify which accounts or organization user groups can see the object) or to PRIVILEGED, which is the default behavior, meaning only roles with explicit privileges on the object can see it.

What objects Snowflake Universal Search can find

This list has grown substantially since Universal Search first launched. As of 2026, Universal Search returns results for:

• Tables and views (including standard, Apache Iceberg™, dynamic and hybrid)
• Workspace files
• Worksheets and dashboards
• Notebooks
• Streamlit applications
• ML models
• Streams, tasks, pipes and stages
• Installed applications
• Application packages
• Databases and schemas
• User-defined functions (UDFs) and stored procedures
• Feature views
• Data products in the Snowflake Marketplace
• Data products in your Internal Marketplace
• Documentation pages from docs.snowflake.com and other-docs.snowflake.com
• Knowledge Base articles from community.snowflake.com

Support for ML models reached GA in March 2025 and support for Snowflake pipes, tasks and streams went GA in May 2025.

Step-by-step guide to using Snowflake Universal Search

Let’s dive into a detailed walkthrough on how to effectively use Snowflake Universal Search, from signing in to Snowsight to accessing and interpreting search results.

Step 1—Sign In to Snowsight

Sign in to your Snowflake account at Snowsight, the web interface for Snowflake. You don’t need to configure anything to start using Universal Search. It’s available from the home page once you’re logged in.

Step 2—Accessing the search bar

Snowflake Universal Search lives on the Snowsight home page. You’ll see a search input field there. If you’re navigating elsewhere in Snowsight, select Search from the navigation menu to get to the search pane, then enter your query there.

This will open the Snowflake Universal Search interface, where you can enter your own search queries.

Step 3—Enter your search terms

Now, type your query into the search field. You can use keyword-style searches or full conversational queries. Press Return or Enter to run the search.

A few tips that actually help:

• Use natural language to describe what you’re looking for, not just object names
• Try different phrasings if the first query doesn’t return what you need
• Include relevant metadata clues in your query, like column descriptions or object tags, if you know them
• Don’t worry about exact spellings. Universal Search handles fuzzy matching

Step 4—Review the categorized results

After entering your search terms, Snowflake Universal Search will process the query and present the results in a categorized format. The search results will be organized into different categories, such as database objects, data products, documentation topics and community knowledge base articles.

Each category will display a list of relevant results, providing you with a quick overview of the available data assets and resources related to your search query. You can easily navigate between categories and explore the various types of results.

Step 5—View details of a search result

To get more insights into a specific search result, click on each individual category to view additional details. Snowflake Universal Search displays all the necessary metadata information to navigate through the details of the search results.

For example:

1) To view only tables or views, select the “Tables & Views” category.

2) To view or open a worksheet or dashboard, select the “Worksheets & Dashboards” category.

3) To view a database or schema, select the “Databases & Schemas” category.

4) For user-defined functions or procedures, select the “Functions & Procedures” category.

As you can see, there are no results in the “Functions & Procedures” category, which means the search input you provided didn’t match any entries. To resolve this, you can reset the search and try again.

5) To view all the data products available in Snowflake Marketplace, select the “Marketplace” category.

We will dive into more depth in Step 6.

6) For all documentation, select the “Documentation” category.

7) Also, there is an “All” category if you want to view all the Snowflake artifacts at once.

Note: If a category isn’t displayed, it means there are no results for that category or your active role does not have access to those results

Step 6—Access Marketplace listings

If your results include Marketplace listings, you can click through to view the full listing details, including description, pricing and terms of use. To get or purchase a listing, you must have agreed to the Snowflake Provider and Consumer Terms.

Limitations of Snowflake Universal Search

Snowflake Universal Search is a powerful and capable feature, but before you use it, you should understand its limitations.

1) Results are role-gated

Results are limited to what your currently active role and any secondary roles can see. If you’re not seeing an object you expect, check whether your active role has the right privileges. Admins can expand discoverability using the OBJECT_VISIBILITY property, but only if it’s been configured for your environment.

2) Indexing delays for new or recreated objects

Newly created objects can take up to a few hours to show up in search results. Objects that are dropped and recreated, such as by automated tasks or pipelines, can temporarily disappear from results for the same duration while the new version is indexed. Plan around this if your workflows regularly recreate objects.

3) Supports only English

Snowflake Universal Search is optimized for English-language queries. Non-English search terms are likely to return degraded results or none at all.

4) Not available in VPS or government cloud

Accounts hosted in Virtual Private Snowflake (VPS) or government cloud environments don’t have access to Snowflake Universal Search. These environments have specific security and compliance requirements that currently prevent the feature from being enabled.

5) Metadata only, no content search

We said this above, but it is worth repeating. Snowflake Universal Search can’t scan the actual data inside your tables. If you need to search for specific values within your data, you’ll need to use SQL or a dedicated data exploration tool.

6) OBJECT_VISIBILITY limitations

The OBJECT_VISIBILITY property can’t be set below the schema level. That means visibility is either on or off for an entire schema. You can’t make individual tables discoverable while hiding others within the same schema. Also, changes to object visibility can take a few hours to reflect in search results.

Further reading

• Search Snowflake objects and resources
• Make database objects discoverable in Universal Search
• Snowflake Cortex AI functions
• Snowflake Provider and Consumer Terms of Service
• Universal Search release notes

 

Conclusion

And that’s a wrap! Snowflake Universal Search has come a long way since its initial preview. What started as a search tool limited to a handful of object types and specific regions is now available to all Snowflake accounts and covers a broad range of object types, including ML models, notebooks, streams, tasks, pipes, Streamlit applications and more. The addition of OBJECT_VISIBILITY also makes it a more practical tool for large teams where not everyone knows what data assets exist. Note that it’s still in preview, so don’t build critical production workflows around it. But for day-to-day data discovery, it’s really useful and getting more capable with each release.

In this article, we covered:

• What Snowflake Universal Search is and how it works technically
• The full list of searchable object types as of 2026
• A step-by-step guide to using Universal Search in Snowsight
• The OBJECT_VISIBILITY feature for expanding discoverability
• Current limitations you need to account for

…and so much more!

 

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