Feature Request: Exclude notebook from search

[robk 3]

Would be great to have a Notebook option that would allow you to exclude that notebook from search results.

My scenario: I have a folder that I keep all my scanned snail mail in. It's all OCR'd. Just about every search I do, when looking for scanned documents or not, returns a lot of 'noise' from that folder.

I envision the feature working such that when I enable the "Exclude from 'All Notebooks' search" option on my Scanned Documents notebook, it would not be searched unless I was IN that folder when performing my search.

Just a thought.

Thanks.

[jbenson2 2,147]

A negative notebook search is not possible at this time.

Almost half of my 8,000 notes are political commentary and I don't want Nancy or Hillary or Harry to pop up when I do some personal searches.

So I tagged all notes in the Politics notebook with a "Z". It can be done relatively quickly to large groups of notes.

When I run a personal search, I add -tag:z. This hides all 4,000 notes in the Politics notebook.

And if Evernote develops a way to hide notebooks, all I have to do is delete the single tag Z in the left column.

[bc91404 1]

Any updates on this thread? Plans for adding the ability to do something like: -notebook:Foo Bar ?

[Herby007 0]

it is my request too - I need archived notebooks and want to exclude such notebooks!

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

It's easy to exclude tags, so what I would do is tag the notes you don't want to show up in a search (IE archived) and exclude the tag. Also, IME, it's very easy to search the results by notebook name & skip over the ones that are in "archived" notebooks.

[ENPowerUser 4]

I really need this feature as well. Can't believe this request is so hard to make it happen. Please, EN, please respond.

[chaug 0]

For me, this would also be a great improvement, but I could imagine that the reason that this is not being implemented is that there is a rather easy (though imperfect) workaround: just tag all notes in a notebook with a certain tag and then excluded that tag from the search. Of course, that requires updating that tag every now and then, so that's why it's not perfect.

So I would like to add a little tweak to this feature request: For me it is important that a certain tag (read: notebook) is by default excluded from all my searcher, i.e. I do not want to become active to exclude those tags but to include them. (Reason: I have loads of scanned books and pdf articles on my EN but most of the time I'm not interested in getting any hits from those (and there are always loads) but from "ordinary notes". So my literature folder (alternatively: my literature tag) should be by default excluded from the search.

That should be rather easy to implement as it does not require any changes in the interface, only in the software clients.

/Christoph

[JonnyBoy 9]

I would like to have this feature as well.

I ran into this need when I wanted to search all my personal notes and avoid those notes in notebooks made by other apps (such as Olive Tree). So a work around was to put my personal notebooks (inbox, offline, online, and shared) in one stack and all the rest of the notebooks in another. Then I either tap on the stack (if I am located in all) before searching or I use the save searches function.

Hope this helps.

[lhl 2]

I've been a Pro user since 2008, but was using Evernote primarily for just my personal notes, which by and large worked fine. Recently, I started taking advantage of the web clipping in earnest - I'm glad I'm not the only one encountering this problem, but I'm quite sad that this thread has been here 2yrs w/o a good solution. (I sent an RFE via email).

Ideally I'd like to be able to webclip to a single notebook and be able to set notebooks to be excluded from searches by default.

Having '-tag' style exclusions would also be nice for searching notebooks and note types (and maybe a saved search/default for options like that?)

Have people come up w/ other workarounds? Since my problem is exclusively w/ saved web pages, I'm trying to see if there's a good alternative product I can use for that...

[jefito 5,589]

The sole workaround that I can think of is to tag all notes in the notebook that you want to exclude with a unique tag, and use -tag:<that-unique-tag-name>

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

The sole workaround that I can think of is to tag all notes in the notebook that you want to exclude with a unique tag, and use -tag:<that-unique-tag-name>

I think jbenson2 has developed the best method along these lines. See his post here for a brief description:

If you want to see his vertical list view on Windows in action, here is a screenshot. I assume the "No tag Z" saved search handles the -tag:x, but maybe he can comment more on that.

[lhl 2]

Are there saved searches on the Mac client? I'm currently running Evernote 5.0.0 Public Beta 1 (400447) - I must admit I've never used saved searches before, so maybe I'm just missing something obvious?

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

Are there saved searches on the Mac client? I'm currently running Evernote 5.0.0 Public Beta 1 (400447) - I must admit I've never used saved searches before, so maybe I'm just missing something obvious?

They're hidden now (personally, I don't see the connection between editing and searching). Edit > Find > Save Search.

[jefito 5,589]

I think jbenson2 has developed the best method along these lines. See his post here for a brief description:

http://discussion.ev...ch/#entry110205

That post describes the solution to a somewhat different problem, I think, For the stated problem here, it all comes down to labelling all of the notes in a notebook uniquely, and using the -tag: option (so long as it fits in with the rest of your search, i.e., modulo AND vs ANY searching).

[kennethmgreen 1]

The sole workaround that I can think of is to tag all notes in the notebook that you want to exclude with a unique tag, and use -tag:<that-unique-tag-name>

This would be fine for me - in fact, I'd prefer to just exclude by tag so I could have a simply saved search that excluded multiple notebooks (where all items across multiple notebook could be tagged). 

 

BUT... the inability to tag Shared notebooks prevents this.

 

So, while I can understand that Evernote design is to not allow negation of notebooks in search, the combination of the inability to tag shared notebooks means I cannot escape searching shared notebook.

 

Has anyone found a workaround for this? (besides removing shared notebooks)

 

Thanks.

[jefito 5,589]

Has anyone found a workaround for this? (besides removing shared notebooks)

No. In fact, I've requested improvements to the search grammar to allow searching the subset of your own notebooks, and joined notebooks (notebooks that are shared to you). Some Evernote clients, the Windows client, for one, allow searching only your own notebooks (select "All My Notes" from the Search Explanation dropdown, but it's not been implemented as of this time.

[kennethmgreen 1]

 

Has anyone found a workaround for this? (besides removing shared notebooks)

No. In fact, I've requested improvements to the search grammar to allow searching the subset of your own notebooks, and joined notebooks (notebooks that are shared to you). Some Evernote clients, the Windows client, for one, allow searching only your own notebooks (select "All My Notes" from the Search Explanation dropdown, but it's not been implemented as of this time.

 

You wrote "but it's not been implemented as of this time" - are you referring to seeing "All My Notes"? I assume that is the case, as I only see Search All Notes and Search Current Context in the Search dropdown on Windows. Are you referring to a beta release?

 

What you are describing isn't ideal, but would at least get me what I want. If it's a beta feature and a forthcoming release feature, that's a stop-gap solution that I can happily wait for.

[jefito 5,589]

You wrote "but it's not been implemented as of this time" - are you referring to seeing "All My Notes"? I assume that is the case, as I only see Search All Notes and Search Current Context in the Search dropdown on Windows. Are you referring to a beta release?

In the Search Explanation panel, towards the top of the note list. It has a light bwon background -- if you're not seeing is, go to View / Show Search Explanation. There's a dropdown there that includes "All My Notes"; it's been in Evernote for some years now.

[kennethmgreen 1]

 

You wrote "but it's not been implemented as of this time" - are you referring to seeing "All My Notes"? I assume that is the case, as I only see Search All Notes and Search Current Context in the Search dropdown on Windows. Are you referring to a beta release?

In the Search Explanation panel, towards the top of the note list. It has a light bwon background -- if you're not seeing is, go to View / Show Search Explanation. There's a dropdown there that includes "All My Notes"; it's been in Evernote for some years now.

 

Ha! I've looked right past that for years. So cool. Thank you.

 

Happy for now - though I'd still prefer the ability to tag shared notes and/or exclude notebooks. 

[RhetTbull 2]

I too think this feature (being able to exclude a notebook from search, by default) would be very useful.  Yes, a negative tag works but is kludgy.  There are good use cases as others here have pointed out for excluding an "archive" notebook from ordinary searches.

[Brad inMinnesota 3]

why does Evernote not listen to their users?

why doesn't Evernote have a standard syntax and provide consistency across the different types of objects.

it all seems to be a big 'hack' and doesn't follow any norm riddled with exceptions and such.

this would also allow easier maintenance on the product.

 

perhaps a new search engine to replace the old one so that the incompatibilities wouldn't have to be addressed.

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

why does Evernote not listen to their users?

why doesn't Evernote have a standard syntax and provide consistency across the different types of objects.

it all seems to be a big 'hack' and doesn't follow any norm riddled with exceptions and such.

this would also allow easier maintenance on the product.

perhaps a new search engine to replace the old one so that the incompatibilities wouldn't have to be addressed.

Evernote does indeed listen to their users. That's pretty clear from many of the feature requests they've added over the years. Listening doesn't mean they will implement a particular request soon, if ever, though.

[Mata Hari 15]

Negative search is of course a SINE QUA NON just as "find and replace" which is also missing. Or possibility to search for special characters (# & etc) Etc.

EN has many such annoying limitations which you discover after years of usage only.

As an example: I have imported an ENEX file and now I want to search everywhere except this ENEX file which would just duplicate the search results.

VERY annoying...

[SkipJohnston 0]

Another vote for this one please. 

[afrobeard 2]

I also have this problem. I use evernote for personal use and for work use and occasionally, someone is at my desk with questions and some of the search results that come up are personal. e.g. my college grade sheets or my SSN number. Its not catastrophic but I want to be able to hide information that I consider privileged. 

[Kevin Presley 0]

Vote for this one as well.