Something wrong with search

[lisec 283]

I searched for: christmas card list. 

I didn't specify a notebook, I didn't put the search in quotation marks and I didn't limit the search to "intitle".  There were hundreds of results. So I kept eliminating tags. And again. And again until I saw a note whose title matched my search terms exactly.  Word for word match.

Why wasn't that note the first result in the list? Why did I have to go through all that work to find it? (Imagine how much worse it would have been had I been using the android version, typing in all those tags with one finger).  For a program that touts itself as being all about the searches this isn't kosher. I should not have to do that much filtering to find a note that includes an exact match with the same words in the same order in the same proximity to each other.

Am I wrong?

 

[DTLow 5,736]

1 hour ago, lisec said:

Why wasn't that note the first result in the list?

The list order is whatever you chose; title, create/update date
You seem to be expecting a different sort order.  Other posts have mentioned "order by relevance" without being clear on the definition or relevance 

I would have narrowed down the parameters in the initial search.  
As you mentioned, quotes and intitle:
I'm not clear about the "eliminating tags" - it seems to be an odd way to drill in on the search results

[gazumped 11,652]

I find my Christmas Card List by searching for <intitle:"christmas card list"> (without the angle brackets) which looks like it should have worked for you.  Making a general search for three words appearing anywhere in the note is bound to produce a lot of extraneous results.

[jefito 5,589]

2 hours ago, lisec said:

I searched for: christmas card list. 

If the search isn't quoted ("christmas card list") then it will search for all notes containing all of the terms "christmas", "card", and "list"; these are separate literal terms (see the section of the "Matching literal terms" section in Evernote Search Grammar here: https://dev.evernote.com/doc/articles/search_grammar.php; the "San Francisco" search is the relevant example.). A search for "christmas card list" would have matched exactly. Beyond that, the order of results is not guaranteed by the search algorithm; in fact, the result set of notes will be in the order specified by the context you're currently using (sort-by-created-date-reversed, in your case). If there were an order-by-relevance setting, then that might have done better for your original search, but there isn't.

 

[lisec 283]

1 hour ago, gazumped said:

I find my Christmas Card List by searching for <intitle:"christmas card list"> (without the angle brackets) which looks like it should have worked for you.  Making a general search for three words appearing anywhere in the note is bound to produce a lot of extraneous results.

Yeah, that's what I do normally as well, but I get tired of always having to repeat my searches because of no results (when using quotation marks). The intitle normally works pretty well, but even there I find I often have to restart the search. I really didn't think I would have that many results with my general search.

Also, I had no clue if I had such a list already and if I did, I had no clue how I might have titled it just because at one point I was being quite descriptive in titles but then I switched to using lots of tags instead (because it is a pain to search in Android) then back to titles, back to tags, and so on.

 

1 hour ago, DTLow said:

Other posts have mentioned "order by relevance" without being clear on the definition or relevance

At its basic level I imagine that the following criteria should be doable when searching and delivering suggestions:

1. Best - results shown are the same as if you typed the search terms in quotation marks - if in title then better than if in note.
2. Next - All the words are within X number of words from each other, in the title or in the note.
3. After that - I don't know, 2 words are better than 1; intitle is better than in the note, that sort of thing.

 

1 hour ago, DTLow said:

I'm not clear about the "eliminating tags" - it seems to be an odd way to drill in on the search results

I'm not sure how else to filter...? Ideally I could exclude my Work and my Woodworking and my Food notebooks but I can't exclude notebooks so... And the positive way to drill in notebooks only searches one notebook at a time.  So I always search "all notes" and  when I see hundreds of results I eliminate tags that I know are irrelevant (woodworking, recipes, food, work).

How do you drill down?

[lisec 283]

37 minutes ago, jefito said:

the order of results is not guaranteed by the search algorithm; in fact, the result set of notes will be in the order specified by the context you're currently using (sort-by-created-date-reversed, in your case). If there were an order-by-relevance setting, then that might have done better for your original search, but there isn't.

 

I would have to think about whether it is more important to display search results by respecting filters or by displaying by relevance. Ideally it would probably be best to go with relevance and then auto revert to the previous filtering but that sounds all too complicated. Either way, I can't imagine anyone would complain too much if the top 5 or 10 list items were the "closest match" and presented as such.  I don't know. I just find that when quotation marks and intitle don't do the trick the results of a general search tend to be so large that I'm constantly having to filter out stuff...  But hey, it's not like I have to go to my filing cabinet and look for it, so there's that ;-)

 

[jefito 5,589]

6 hours ago, lisec said:

But hey, it's not like I have to go to my filing cabinet and look for it, so there's that ;-)

Exactly!