search on hierarchical tag structure doesn't return child tags

[donkeyfur 3]

I have been trying to find ways to squeeze more organization into or out of my Evernote use.

I have been reading that EN design really supports limited nesting of concepts in stack/notebook/note structure, and that it is really supportive of more complex networked relationships using tags. Ok. I started designing a nice tag structure, and decided to test it before I got too far. I set up a parent tag: Analytics, and 3 child tags: Quantitative, Qualitative, Visualization. I can apply these so I have 2 notes with Analytics, 5 notes with Quantitative, 20 notes with Qualitative, and 10 notes with Visualization. I can search on any child tag and get the relevant notes, but if I want to find all Analytics notes (including all descendant notes), it comes up with just the 2 notes with the specific Analytics tag. It leaves me to wonder, is this a bug or a feature? Or a User Error? I'm hoping for the latter. 

Without too much of a rant here, it seems like the hierarchical nature of the tags is more conceptual that practical if I don't get any inheritance properties in child or grandchild relationships. If that's the case, why is this seen as so useful? I'm probably missing something insightful here, but am honestly trying to get more good use out of this platform.

Thanks for any pearls of wisdom.

[Mike P 3,432]

2 minutes ago, donkeyfur said:

Without too much of a rant here, it seems like the hierarchical nature of the tags is more conceptual that practical if I don't get any inheritance properties in child or grandchild relationships. If that's the case, why is this seen as so useful? I'm probably missing something insightful here, but am honestly trying to get more good use out of this platform.

I seem to remember that in the old version (aka legacy) there were some options around how the tags in the hierarcy interacted. You are correct that there is no automatic inheritance of tags through the hierarchy. You can of course chose to tag notes with the parent tags as well. Alternatively you can use the search syntax to specifically find all the notes tagged with the various tags

any: tag:Analytics tag:Quantitative tag:Qualitative tag:Visualization.

I personally like the tag hierarchy because it organises my tags rather than because I want to search by groups of tags or have notes inherit multiple levels of tags. The way it currently operates I get more control.

[donkeyfur 3]

Thanks, Mike. I do see a value in being able to create structure in the tags. Your point about manually adding the ancestral tags is true, and arguably not that hard. It just seems to sidestep a beneficial consequence of that structure by not embedding that structure in the actual tags. 
 

Does anyone else think this would be a helpful feature? Is it worth submitting a formal request for it? It’s hard to know if this would require significant restructuring of the code to support.

[ehrt74 241]

Hi! if you go to the tags view and click on a parent tag you can select "filter with subtags". Unfortunately on the web client this filters with AND and not with OR 😕

 

[eric99 1,111]

1 hour ago, ehrt74 said:

Hi! if you go to the tags view and click on a parent tag you can select "filter with subtags". Unfortunately on the web client this filters with AND and not with OR 😕

 

It's an AND in the Windows version as well.  I don't have any use case for this weird behavior 😕

[gazumped 12,634]

11 hours ago, donkeyfur said:

Is it worth submitting a formal request for it?

You can at least judge how many other users would find it useful by starting a votable Feature Request thread on this... no harm in asking!

[Mike P 3,432]

1 hour ago, ehrt74 said:

Hi! if you go to the tags view and click on a parent tag you can select "filter with subtags". Unfortunately on the web client this filters with AND and not with OR 😕

 

This has been mentioned at various stages in the past. The same bahaviour as for the filter. At least we can get around it using the search syntax as in my example.

[ehrt74 241]

3 hours ago, eric99 said:

It's an AND in the Windows version as well.  I don't have any use case for this weird behavior 😕

yeah, i'm struggling to think of a use for this behaviour. How would you need to use tags so that this behaviour would be useful?

[donkeyfur 3]

Thanks to you all on this. I appreciate the clarification. It is strange to see they've hardwired the AND logic. I also don't easily see the benefit in that. I appreciate the search syntax example, Mike P. I don't usually use that, but it would definitely work.

I'll also try the votable Feature Request. Thanks for the suggestion. I've never even looked at the Feature Request option, so wasn't aware of the options.

[PinkElephant 9,253]

They needed to decide on something. So it either was AND or OR. The decided for AND, because most likely people when searching are intuitively thinking they want to find content with all search words. Because EN then usually sorts the results "by relevance", they add some search voodoo to it to make the most likely results stand at the beginning of the list. For my searches, this works most of the time.

There are 3 ways to move from that first result, 2 of them again intuitive: Not found enough, or nothing - remove or modify a search word. Found too many - add a search term. The third requires a grain of learning: Use the advanced search syntax, for example to convert the AND search into an OR search.

Either way, it is not really a massive hurdle. Usually you have a feeling what should be returned (what you are looking for, and know it must be there, of course), and by using it, you get better in setting it up.