Inititle:TO or intitle:to returns every note

[geoff2k 1]

I'm trying to be more consistent, and realized that I have been using the terms "TODO" and "TO DO" interchangeably in my note titles.

Searching for "intitle:TODO" does exactly what I expect.

Searching for "intitle:DO" does exactly what I expect.

Searching for "intitle:TO" returns every single note (and no, not all of my notes have the string "TO" in them).

What is going on?

[gazumped 11,666]

Hi.  What version of Evernote are you using?  Mobile / Desktop / Web?  and what OS?  Apple / Windows?

In my Windows Desktop version intitle:to gets me 2,000 or so notes which (AFAICS) all have "to" in the title.  Changing that to intitle:to* jumps the hit list to 6,000+ (out of 22,000) which have variations on together / towards / tomorrow.  I don't seem to have any issue with finding accurate results.

I'm not sure what's causing your anomaly,  but you may want to find all your TODO and TO DO notes and apply a standard tag to all of them which will limit the number of searches you require.

[DTLow 5,736]

1 hour ago, geoff2k said:

I'm trying to be more consistent, and realized that I have been using the terms "TODO" and "TO DO" interchangeably in my note titles.

Searching for "intitle:TODO" does exactly what I expect.

Searching for "intitle:DO" does exactly what I expect.

Searching for "intitle:TO" returns every single note (and no, not all of my notes have the string "TO" in them).

What is going on?

I'm getting the same thing (all my notes) with  intitle:To   on my iPad and Mac

You might want to use search     any: intitle:TODO intitle:"TO DO"

You can read more on Search Grammar at https://dev.evernote.com/doc/articles/search_grammar.php
It doesn't have any reference to the "To" issue
It looks like "To" is being ignored in the search (punctuation is also ignored)

[geoff2k 1]

26 minutes ago, gazumped said:

Hi.  What version of Evernote are you using?  Mobile / Desktop / Web?  and what OS?  Apple / Windows?

In my Windows Desktop version intitle:to gets me 2,000 or so notes which (AFAICS) all have "to" in the title.  Changing that to intitle:to* jumps the hit list to 6,000+ (out of 22,000) which have variations on together / towards / tomorrow.  I don't seem to have any issue with finding accurate results.

I'm not sure what's causing your anomaly,  but you may want to find all your TODO and TO DO notes and apply a standard tag to all of them which will limit the number of searches you require.

I get the same result whether I use the web interface or the desktop OSX client (Version 6.10 (454269 App Store)).

The kind of labelling you're referring to is exactly why I'm trying to find all the notes with TO in their title.  Just wanted to make sure I wasn't doing something obviously wrong...

Thanks for the reply!

[skkippy 12]

An undocumented behavior of Evernote search is that some small words are not indexed, and hence can't be used effectively in searches.  I wish I had a list of the words - I found out the hard way that 'not' is one of them.  See a September 2014 Evernote employee's reply to a similar question here:

https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/67533-evernote-for-mac-56/?do=findComment&comment=304146

Possible workaround: I have notes beginning with 'to read' 'not read' and 'read'.  I can't write a query which will discriminate between these, but I can query on 'read' and sort alphabetically.  In the result, notes beginning 'not read' then precede notes beginning 'read' and so on.  I can then select and tag the groups separately.