(Archived) Exclude notebook(s) from search (archive notebook)

[fncll 1]

I have quite a few notes that I don't want to lose but are unnecessarily included in search results. Is there any way to exclude a notebook (or more) from a search? Related, a nice feature would be "archive" notebooks or somesuch that would be automatically excluded from general searches, but still available to be specifically searched and browsed when needed...

[engberg 89]

You can focus a search so it only looks within a notebook, but you can't exclude notebooks from an "all notebooks" search.

You could theoretically archive a set of old notes by Exporting them to an .enex file and then save that file somewhere safe. This would lose any backups within our service, however.

This is a little tedious, but you could tag these notes with a special tag (e.g. "old") and then add this to any search to keep those notes out of the results:

-tag:old

That says "exclude any note with an 'old' tag"

The search could then be saved if you use it a lot.

[minim 0]

I actually logged in today to make this request for an "archived" status of notebook. I don't so much mind whether it's searchable or not (although not searchable by default, with a search option as suggested by fncll would be brilliant). I'm using Evernote as the digital filing part of my GTD setup and as such I have separate notebooks for every project. I upload Word docs, sound files, images, PDFs, and email in correspondence related to each project because I need access to that information while the project is happening. Once it's finished, I'd still like to keep those in my system for reference (i.e. I really don't want to export them and delete them because I've done this with mail files and they inevitably vanish into the ether and I can't find them when I need them - the digital equivalent of putting your keys "in a safe place" where they're never found again, plus I don't know where I'll be when I need to search that archived data - could be at home, at work, on the road, who knows?) but not have them in my general list of notebooks. I have something like 35 notebooks at the moment and it's getting a little unwieldy - it's going to be unmanageable by the time I have 135.

If an "archived" status is not being considered for Evernote, is there at least the possibility of nested notebooks being introduced so I can invent my own structure for keeping archived notebooks out of the main list?