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Search returns too many results (by ignoring currently selected tags)


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Posted

Hi:

I use hierarchical tags to organize Evernote. When I mark a top level tag, evernote shows all notes associates with the top level tag and all tags below. So far so good. When I now enter a search term in the quick search box, evernote seems to ignore the currently selected tags. Instead, evernote shows me all notes that match the search term, irrespective of tags.

For instance, when I mark the top level tag "Research", evernote shows 89 notes. When I now type in "instrument", evernote shows 138 notes (this is the search text under the quick search box):

Viewing 138 notes in "All Notebooks" matching ANY of the following: contains words starting with "instrument" tagged with "Research", "All Tags under Research"

I don't understand the logic behind this search. Can someone shine some light on this issue?

Thank you!

Steve

  • Level 5*
Posted

Hi.  You can drag a tag name from the tag list to the search summary bar,  or use the 'tags' icon in that bar (see below) to add more qualifications,  or search specifically for "tag:<tag1>,tag:<tag2>, etc".  A new search will be a global search.

ScreenClip.png

  • Level 5*
Posted
8 hours ago, enfinity said:

Viewing 138 notes in "All Notebooks" matching ANY of the following: contains words starting with "instrument" tagged with "Research", "All Tags under Research"

I don't understand the logic behind this search. Can someone shine some light on this issue?

Here is the logic: when you have the Tools / Options / Navigation / "Automatically select child tags" option enabled (as I believe that you do), selecting a parent tag also selects all of its children, and automatically turns the search into an "OR" search, i.e., the search is for all notes that have the tag "Research " OR any of its children. Adding a literal text search term like "instrument" (or any other type of term) does not cancel the "OR" part of the search; the search now becomes a search for all notes that have the tag "Research " OR any of its children OR which contain the word "instrument". This will always result in at least as many matches as the previous search, which is exactly what you're seeing.

In general, there's no way to perform mixed OR/AND searches in Evernote (there are some special cases involving wildcards on literal text and tag names, but the use cases for these don't seem to apply here), which is what you appear to be trying to do (i.e. find all notes that have the tag "Research " OR any of its children AND which contain the word "instrument"). See the Evernote Search Grammar for reference.

Posted

Jeff: This is an excellent explanation -- the best asset Evernote has are the people in this forum. The software itself, unfortunately, is the single most counterintuitive tool I'm using day to day.

  • Level 5*
Posted

The rules for search are pretty simple, just takes some getting used to. It would be nice to have more complicated search queries (and they've been requested over the years), but I don't bark my shins on those any more, at least very often. I've used Evernote for 8 years, use it often at work and for personal stuff, and I tend to keep things simple -- it works well for me. I don't find much that's egregiously counterintuitive, but as I said, I've used it for a pretty good while...

Edit: I'll note that I was taken by surprise by the " Automatically select child tag" thingie when I encountered it, but that's mostly because I wasn't tracking the changes in the release log. I'd select a tag that happened to be a parent tag, and all of a sudden, I'd get a bunch of tags added, and it would be an OR search. Baffled me to no end until I figured it out. Usually I keep that disabled now.

  • Level 5*
Posted
30 minutes ago, jefito said:

Baffled me to no end until I figured it out. Usually I keep that disabled now.

Yeah, parent inheritance without an AND capability is a very narrow use case, very narrow.  :(

Posted

Cal: Why is this a very narrow use case? People use hierarchical tags. Moreover, people use quick search. I assume a lot of people use both and may get confused by this behavior.

Moreover, I got two responses to my follow-up comment within two hours, which is great (I send this query to Evernote support a few days ago and NOTHING). -- again, Evernote has so many loyal/great users, but the company/product is a mess.

  • Level 5*
Posted
4 minutes ago, enfinity said:

Cal: Why is this a very narrow use case? People use hierarchical tags. Moreover, people use quick search. I assume a lot of people use both and may get confused by this behavior.

Not Cal, but my take is that it's a narrow use case because OR searches always produce more result notes rather than fewer, making it hard to identify notes that you're searching for. People generally want to narrow their result sets, and that's what AND searches do. Not being able to mix AND and OR in a search limits the search facility's usefulness.

Posted

Agreed. It narrows the search capabilities.

Moreover, the way this OR search is implemented is completely intransparent to the end user. I can see that power users understand this behavior, but I suspect Evernote wants to target a broader market.

Posted

This is what the enduser sees (see attachment). If they would replace the "tagged with" with "OR", I would understand how the search works. But the way it is displayed makes no sense.

2016-12-29_14-19-14.png

 

EDIT: OK, I guess the ANY suggests the OR. Still, there gotta be a better way.

  • Level 5*
Posted
12 minutes ago, enfinity said:

Cal: Why is this a very narrow use case? People use hierarchical tags. Moreover, people use quick search. I assume a lot of people use both and may get confused by this behavior.

Moreover, I got two responses to my follow-up comment within two hours, which is great (I send this query to Evernote support a few days ago and NOTHING). -- again, Evernote has so many loyal/great users, but the company/product is a mess.

I was saying EN's deployment is a very narrow use case.  Per @jefito if you want to treat a group of notes as the "same tag" using inheritance, not having an AND capability makes it next to useless for anything other than just an all notes in the parent/child tag group search.

  • Level 5*
Posted
2 minutes ago, enfinity said:

This is what the enduser sees (see attachment). If they would replace the "tagged with" with "OR", I would understand how the search works. But the way it is displayed makes no sense.

2016-12-29_14-19-14.png

Any is the operative term in the above, basically means OR.

  • Level 5*
Posted

I have to mention the flip side, which is that if you want to identify the group of notes containing tags in a tree for some group operation (editing, tagging, re-notebooking, export, etc.), then sure, the hierarchical tag thing does work for that. But I'd guess that that was a rarer scenario than just trying to locate particular notes.

  • Level 5*
Posted

For sure, and you could accomplish that before without too much hassle by opening the left panel and shift clicking the tags, on those rarer occasions.  Still can for that matter.  ;)

End of the day I think we would appreciate a little love on the AND functionality.  Meanwhile workaround for me has been to precede the couple of tag hierarchies I might want to AND search with a character, = for example for people.  So tag:=* tag:follow.up returns notes to follow up for all people.  FWIW.

 

  • Level 5*
Posted
3 minutes ago, enfinity said:

Thanks for the great suggestions -- I have a better idea how to tackle my search needs now.

You are welcome.

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