I know EN search is supposed to be great, but I've been using the internet since the beginning and am somewhat of a power user but I can rarely find what I'm looking for in EN using search. Especially in Android. It's amazing how seldom it works for me! I KNOW something is there, but it's buried and I just want to search for a note but I will often get everything but what I'm looking for or nothing. Then I start drilling down through my notebooks and there it is. Mostly given up on search in EN.
I know it's me because there are a host of people on the forum who will tell me that it's great, they use it all the time etc.
So, assume I'm somewhat stupid and have a poor memory for learning special search terms, but perhaps I'm a typical EN user. One thing I've learned is that EN search is not selective unless you tell it to be. It just brings up every note with the words or letters you searched for, usually somehow the oldest and least useful. It's kind of like the old search engines (Alta Vista?) before google- if you searched for something, you'd get a lot of noise mixed in with what you were looking for and just be swamped with poor results.
I can think of two ways to make it better:
1) Intelligent search, more like Google:
Put more recent and more "popular" results at the top. Notes I rarely visit or that were last edited years ago would not show up far up the list from the note I made last week.
Give the title of a note priority over the body. If I search for "home AC" show the note that has home AC as a title or part of that waay above a note that has "home" and/or the letters "ac" somewhere in it's body.
Build some forgiveness into it like a search engine does. Example: I just looked up how to search within titles only again. intitle: I had tried title: and failed. Then I went to help and found it was "intitle" yet it still failed, because my syntax was off by one space between intitle: and the term. Wow. I was floored that it was that literal without even adding quotes. Build some humanity into this. Google can find a term even if you don't spell it right. Not to mention have a space in the search that is not literally important.
2) Offer more sophisticated filtering in a menu form for what can currently only be effected by coding within the search box (ie using code terms like "intitle:") - this is probably a far easier way for EN to help us. A filter menu/icon that drops down and has check boxes for most (or all) filters along with any related limits. ie
Search Filters
"title only"
"body only"
"date last edited _____to _____"
etc
I seem to remember that there is now a way to have Google search my notes....hmm...maybe that's the trick.. but it's not showing up lately on websearch although it's checked.
Idea
SWSL 84
I know EN search is supposed to be great, but I've been using the internet since the beginning and am somewhat of a power user but I can rarely find what I'm looking for in EN using search. Especially in Android. It's amazing how seldom it works for me! I KNOW something is there, but it's buried and I just want to search for a note but I will often get everything but what I'm looking for or nothing. Then I start drilling down through my notebooks and there it is. Mostly given up on search in EN.
I know it's me because there are a host of people on the forum who will tell me that it's great, they use it all the time etc.
So, assume I'm somewhat stupid and have a poor memory for learning special search terms, but perhaps I'm a typical EN user. One thing I've learned is that EN search is not selective unless you tell it to be. It just brings up every note with the words or letters you searched for, usually somehow the oldest and least useful. It's kind of like the old search engines (Alta Vista?) before google- if you searched for something, you'd get a lot of noise mixed in with what you were looking for and just be swamped with poor results.
I can think of two ways to make it better:
1) Intelligent search, more like Google:
2) Offer more sophisticated filtering in a menu form for what can currently only be effected by coding within the search box (ie using code terms like "intitle:") - this is probably a far easier way for EN to help us. A filter menu/icon that drops down and has check boxes for most (or all) filters along with any related limits. ie
Search Filters
I seem to remember that there is now a way to have Google search my notes....hmm...maybe that's the trick.. but it's not showing up lately on websearch although it's checked.
Thanks
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