Bluesky Search Operators for Posts, People, and Links

Bluesky search operators help you find a post by its author, a linked domain, or a date range. Combine them with a word or quoted phrase rather than trying to remember the exact sentence someone wrote.

A search for English posts linking to MDN can be as small as this:

CSS domain:developer.mozilla.org lang:en

Paste that into Bluesky’s search box. Keeping one useful constraint at a time makes a search much easier to debug when it returns nothing.

Bluesky search operators for people and phrases

The Bluesky team’s search guide documents the operators available in the app. These are the ones worth starting with:

The from: and mentions: operators take a handle, such as bsky.app, rather than a profile-page URL. Quoting a phrase can also match text in an image’s description.

For example, "container queries" is a narrower starting point than two unrelated words. If that misses the post, remove the quotes before adding more filters.

Find something you posted yourself

Start with the author and a distinctive word:

from:me Hugo

The me shortcut requires a signed-in account. A full handle is more useful when sharing the search with someone else:

from:bsky.app "search"

Mentions answer a different question. mentions:me looks for posts mentioning you; it does not mean “everything I wrote.” Combining from:me mentions:bsky.app looks for your posts mentioning that account.

The distinction saves a surprising amount of scrolling. I would narrow by author before trying to reconstruct a sentence from memory.

Find links to an article or a whole website

Paste a complete article URL into search when you want that page specifically. Use domain: when you want links from the wider site:

Hugo domain:ronaldsvilcins.com

That query asks for posts matching Hugo with links to the domain. It is different from searching the literal text ronaldsvilcins.com, which someone could mention without linking it.

If a URL search comes back empty, try the domain and one unusual word from the title. Search results are useful for discovery, but an empty result is not proof that nobody shared the page.

Add a date range after finding the right subject

Bluesky accepts since: and until: with ISO dates or UTC timestamps. A bounded search can look like this:

"CSS" lang:en since:2026-09-01 until:2026-10-01

Use the UTC date when working near midnight. Your local calendar day and the UTC date may differ.

Language filtering uses a language code such as en, lv, or ja. It is a useful narrowing step, but drop it temporarily if a search seems unexpectedly sparse.

A practical sequence is to find the subject, add an author or domain, then add dates. Putting every remembered detail into the first query makes it harder to tell which constraint excluded the post.

Keep shared searches independent of your account

A query containing from:me means something different for each signed-in reader. Replace me with the full handle before sending the query to a colleague or putting it in documentation.

Bluesky also documents account-search personalization for signed-in users. Avoid assuming that another person will see precisely the same account ordering.

For a lost post, the important test is whether the query identifies it. The first result is not a stable identifier to save elsewhere; keep the post’s own URL once you find it.

Use the API when the search belongs in a tool

The app’s search syntax is convenient for people. For code, consult the current Bluesky API reference for app.bsky.feed.searchPosts rather than parsing the search page’s HTML.

Check the endpoint’s filters, authentication requirements, and response before building a workflow around it. An app query is a useful description of what you want to find, but copying it into an API request is not a complete integration.

For everyday use, I would keep a few searches rather than memorize the whole syntax. A subject plus from: or domain: usually gives you something concrete to refine.

← Back to all articles