Why did these get included in the search

[mikecox39 13]

 

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

If you could please post the exact text in your Search box we might be able to help.

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

In Evernote, search words are numbers, letters and underscore. Everything else is a delimiter. But even so, the file name contains the two terms you are searching on. So I don't know why you think they should not be showing up due to the photo.ps part...

[mikecox39 13]

If you could please post the exact text in your Search box we might be able to help.

that was my exact search, I wanted all notes with photo.lr and photo.tutorial. That seemed to work, until I noticed photo.ps got included, and I didn't want photo.ps notes.

[jbenson2 2,147]

It looks like you were searching for notes that contained two tags.

tag:photo.Ir tag:photo.tutorial

 

The reason notes containing photo.Ps were included was because those notes were also tagged with your two search terms.

 

If you don't want the photo.Ps to show up, you can edit the search term to:

tag:photo.Ir tag:photo.tutorial -tag:photo.Ps

 

The minus sign will remove those tagged notes from your results

[mikecox39 13]

 the file name contains the two terms you are searching on. So I don't know why you think they should not be showing up due to the photo.ps part...

Because I didn't include the tag; photo.ps in my search, just photo.lr and photo.tutorial.  That's why I thought photo.ps shouldn't have been included.

[jefito 5,589]

Windows client? First place to go is the search explanation: View / Show Search Explanation. That will show, in the search control over your note list, what Evernote thinks it's searching for.

 

One curious thing: if you are doing a strictly tag search, then normally Evernote wouldn't be highlighting anything, as you have no text search terms. Are you sure that you are showing us the entire search string?

 

One thing is often worth trying: putting the terms that contain '.' in quotes in your search. E.g. tag:"photo.lr" tag:"photo.tutorial"

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

I use periods in many of my tags, and it's never been a problem searching in EN Mac, and I don't remember any issues in EN Win, but it's been a while.  IOW, I do not need to put tags with periods in quotes.

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

the file name contains the two terms you are searching on. So I don't know why you think they should not be showing up due to the photo.ps part...

Because I didn't include the tag; photo.ps in my search, just photo.lr and photo.tutorial. That's why I thought photo.ps shouldn't have been included.

But...you didn't exclude photo.ps in your search parameters.

Using valid search terms (no special characters) of:

Cat, dog, tag:animals

A note containing the words cat, dog, mouse will be a result. If you don't want that note to be a result, you'd need to do:

tag:animals, cat, dog, -mouse

Or ...

Cat, dog, tag:animals, -tag:rodents

[jefito 5,589]

BnF & jbenson, you both nailed it. I misread the posted image as being a note, not the note list, and thought the highlights were done by Evernote as matches to standard text terms..

 

The rule here is that a normal search will look for matches in *all* of its terms, and that's the only criteria for passing the test. If you want to exclude notes on the basis of tags or text content, you need to do so explicitly.

 

that was my exact search, I wanted all notes with photo.lr and photo.tutorial. That seemed to work, until I noticed photo.ps got included, and I didn't want photo.ps notes.

To that point, a note tagged with photo.lr, photo.tutorial and photo.ps will pass the search criteria "tag:photo.lr tag:photo.tutorial". In general, there's no way to specify searches that return matches for notes tagged only with photo.lr and photo.tutorial. In some cases, like this one, apparently, you can specify exclusions that do what you want, but in general, Evernote doesn't have any way to express ONLY searches.