Articles/Finding

Searching your saves in two languages

Updated 13 October 2026. 2 minute read.

If you live in two languages, your saved things do too. You read an English review, a German forum thread and a French recipe, and later you search in whichever language your head happens to be in. An ordinary search box matches letters, so "Stuhl" will never find an article that only says "chair".

People who read in several languages usually work around this without noticing. They search twice, or they give up and scroll.

How Stashy handles it

When Stashy reads a save on your device, it writes a set of hidden keywords for it. Those keywords are not only words from the page. They include synonyms and translations of the main terms.

Take an English article about the Eames Lounge Chair. Its keywords might include:

• chair, armchair, lounge chair
• mid-century, design classic
• Stuhl, Sessel

Search looks through titles, summaries and these keywords. So typing "Stuhl" finds the English article, and typing "chair" finds a German one.

Nothing is sent to a translation service for this. The keywords are written by Apple's on-device model at the moment the item is saved, and stored with it.

What stays in its own language

The summary is written in the language of the page. A French recipe gets a French summary. Reading a summary in a different language from the page it describes is more confusing than helpful, especially when you open the page and none of the words match.

Names are left alone as well. A brand, a person or a place is the same in every language.

Getting the most out of it

• Search for the thing, not the phrase. One or two nouns work better than a sentence.
• Try the other language before you give up. Translations cover the main terms of a page, not every word in it.
• Use the kind of item to narrow down. If you know it was a PDF or a voice memo, start there.
• Or ask. A question in your own words can find saves that no single search term would. See ask your library.

Older saves

Things you saved before a feature existed do not have its benefits straight away. Stashy catches up on older items in the background, on your device, and Settings shows the progress. Search works in the meantime. It simply gets better as the catching up finishes.

Why this matters more than it sounds

The point of saving something is to have it at the moment you need it. That moment does not announce which language you will be thinking in. A library that only answers in the language of the source is, for anyone bilingual, a library that works half the time.