Google Workspaces Chat Rooms suck
Published: Monday, Feb 1, 2021 Last modified: Wednesday, Feb 24, 2021
Typically on a “Gsuite” enabled company you have
- A chat room
- A mailing list
Problem with the chat room 
You will have a room that looks like: https://chat.google.com/room/${RANDOM_11_CHARS}
Issues:
- Opaque room URL
- Difficult to find/join rooms since you need to go via a Browse Rooms dialog
- No pin / topic
- No way to link to a conversation
- No way to reference a message in a reply
Cloud search is of no help when it comes to searching in Chat rooms. However Gmail search can search “direct messages”, 1:1 conversations, but NOT ROOMS.
Problems with the mailing list 
It looks like https://groups.google.com/a/${COMPANY}/g/${FRIENDLY_NAME}, which is good, but:
- It’s even slower than Chat
- People tend to use chat instead
- If you search with chat you will not get Group results
- If you search Groups messages you will not get chat results
tl;dr
Having business discussions in Google Chat Rooms aka https://chat.google.com/room/ has serious limitations for search, let alone basic chat functionality. For example you can’t even search across rooms.
The workaround is to bookmark https://chat.google.com/search/room/${RANDOM_11_CHARS} and remember to search there specifically if you are looking for a message from that specific Chat room.