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Search on Search Results (Advanced Multilevel Search)


terablade2001

Idea

With Tags I have a problem when I am trying to select any note of different tags, by rejecting at the same time notes that have other specific tags.

I.e. suppose that I have many notes in my notebooks containing the tags apple, lemon, tomato and fresh, good, not-to-eat, deadly, etc, etc, etc.

Now I am searching to find ANY notes having the apple, lemon and tomato tags, which are also not tagged as not-to-eat or deadly.
How can I achieve such a search?

What I tried is to select tags apple, lemon and tomato with option ANY, and then add the command "-tag:not-to-eat" (and later the "-tag:deadly").
However by adding the command "-tag:not-to-eat" is suddenly fetching and all the notes that does not have the tag not-to-eat !
Thus the search result, returns almost all notes even if they are not tagged as apple, lemon or tomato! (i.e. because almost all notes they are not tagged as not-to-eat)

The only solution to this problem seems to be a Search over the Search results of the first search. What I mean?

  1. Do a search of type ANY with tags apple, lemon, tomato.
  2. Then click on a button like [New Search on Search Results], or (+) button or whatever (This also could be a command like "--cacheResults")
    • By pressing this button, evernote should cache the Resulted notes as the only notes that are going to be used for the next search.
  3. Do a search of type ANY with tags "-tag:not-to-eat", "-tag:deadly".
    • This search will be applied ONLY on the previously cached Resulted notes of the previous Search.
    • Thus this search will select all apple, lemon or tomato notes that are not tagged as not-to-eat, or deadly. This is what I need for now.
  4. Furthermore if we need to include/exclude more tags on the "eatable" apple, lemon or tomato notes we should be able to:
    1. press again the (+) button (or type --cacheResults again)
    2. add new search query, i.e. "-tag:very-expensive" and "tag:by-greengrocer"

A. Is the above search-behavior possible in current Evernote Search Engine? (without having to modify the notes, i.e. moving the search resulted notes to a common notebook - cache notebook)
B. If not, how about implementing such a very very useful behavior in future?

 

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8 minutes ago, terablade2001 said:

Now I am searching to find ANY notes having the apple, lemon and tomato tags, which are also not tagged as not-to-eat or deadly.
How can I achieve such a search?

Unfortunately, this is not possible in Evernote.  What are asking for is known as full boolean search.

This has been requested for many years by many users, but Evernote has failed to provide.
It is hard to understand why they have not, since the underlying database is a SQLite DB, which fully supports boolean searches very easily.  This is old, old, well-established SQL technology.

You can find these other requests by search the forum on "boolean search".

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5 hours ago, terablade2001 said:

Is the above search-behavior possible in current Evernote Search Engine? (without having to modify the notes, i.e. moving the search resulted notes to a common notebook - cache notebook)

I added my vote.  A two level search would be useful

In logical terms, your search is    (apple or lemon or tomato) and not to-eat and not deadly

As @JMichaelTX said, Evernote is not set up to handle that complicated a search
You can't do both AND/OR

As a workaround, my solution would be as you said Search over the Search on my Mac

I would do the first search     (apple or lemon or tomato) and apply a temporary tag (TEMP)
Then a second search           TEMP and not to-eat and not deadly

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First place to start in learning about advanced Evernote search facilities is the Evernote Search Grammar reference: https://dev.evernote.com/doc/articles/search_grammar.php

One very important limitation of the Evernote search language is that you cannot have mixed AND/OR searches (except under very constrained circumstances). Normal Evernote searches are AND searches. By adding the search term "any:", it becomes an OR search. An Evernote search may only be one or the other, not both. And it looks to me that that's what you're trying to create.

13 minutes ago, terablade2001 said:

Now I am searching to find ANY notes having the apple, lemon and tomato tags, which are also not tagged as not-to-eat or deadly.
How can I achieve such a search?

What I tried is to select tags apple, lemon and tomato with option ANY, and then add the command "-tag:not-to-eat" (and later the "-tag:deadly").

It sounds like you want to isolate to notes having one of the tags "apple", "lemon", or "tomato", and then select those notes that are not tagged as "not-to-eat" or "deadly"). That would equate to (tag:apple OR tag:lemon OR tag:tomato) AND (-tag:not-to-eat OR -tag:deadly). So that's a mixed AND/OR search, and you just can't express it in Evernote in general.

I assume that the explicit Evernote search you tried was "any: tag:apple tag:lemon tag:tomato -tag:not-to-eat -tag:deadly". That's the equivalent of (tag:apple OR tag:lemon OR tag:tomato OR -tag:not-to-eat OR -tag:deadly), which isn't what you want.

There's already feature requests for things like "Full Boolean Search", and plenty of debate and discussion, which you can find by searching the forum. I'd suggest that you find one and add your vote to it. Here's one: 

 

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8 minutes ago, DTLow said:

My solution would be as you said Search over the Search on my Mac

I would do the first search     (apple or lemon or tomato) and apply a temporary tag (TEMP)
Then a second search           TEMP and not to-eat and not deadly

Yep, the canonical workaround. 

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The idea of using temporary tags (to "cache" the results per search) seems quite interesting as workaround. Evernote should do this internally (or automated) however as this is such a basic thing for searching.

I understand the connection with AND/OR mixed operations, but I think this approach (breaking the queries) can be more understandable for many more users, specially if a proper GUI is used thus the user can be able to add/remove multiple AND queries (with buttons (+) /(-) like i.e. when searching in some email browsers).

Ps. It's quite disappointing that such important features seems to be ignored; if that's the case. If I have such needs by using Evernote for a month - and Evernote can't help it - what will happen after 2 years? :(

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8 hours ago, terablade2001 said:

The idea of using temporary tags (to "cache" the results per search) seems quite interesting as workaround. Evernote should do this internally (or automated) however as this is such a basic thing for searching.

The thing of it is, you still need to express such a filter using the search language (which is recognized by all Evernote clients and the Evernote service itself, as well as persisted in saved searches), so the search language would need to change as well, and Evernote seems to be very cautious about making changes to that -- there haven't been any for several years, as far as I know.

8 hours ago, terablade2001 said:

Ps. It's quite disappointing that such important features seems to be ignored; if that's the case. If I have such needs by using Evernote for a month - and Evernote can't help it - what will happen after 2 years? :(

The usual rules apply: if the tool suits your needs, then use it; otherwise find one that does. I've been using Evernote for 8+ years now, for work and personal stuff, and haven't really had a compelling need for full Boolean search yet. I understand the rules, and keep things pretty simple, and it all works out pretty well. I also understand that that may not work as well for others.

Oh, and one exception to the "no mixed AND/OR" searches: You can get around that somewhat by using wildcards ('*') on text terms or tag names. Standard AND searches (i.e., no 'any:' term, that contain wildcarded terms are inherently mixed AND/OR. For example, a search like "a* tag:b*" is really a mixed AND/OR search: return all notes that contain any word beginning with 'a' and have any tag beginning with 'b'. You may be able to contrive a tag system that takes advantage of this by using common tag prefixes. More work than I care to go through, but it does make some searches possible.

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