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REQUEST: Domain searching


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In a recent discussion of the sourceURL search, JMichael mentioned something I've long wanted:

Seems like a search on just the Domain would be very useful.

The issue he's referring to (as Jeff explained above on that thread) is that, currently, the sourceURL search only returns hits with a perfect match of the full URL string, including "http://" and "www," where they exist, or whatever has been entered into the sourceURL field. The search (or the field) doesn't recognize domains within, so there's no way to search for a domain unless you correctly remember what it's preceded by, whether that's "http://," "http://www.," or something else.

One example: I clip a lot from nytimes.com. I know that the format of nytimes.com pages is always "http://www.nytimes.com*," so I now search that without problem. But the implications of this are:

  • If I don't remember whether a page includes the "www" (some do, and some don't), I may not find it in the search
  • I have to type out "http://www." to correctly run most searches, and if I miss or mistype a letter in that string, the search returns nothing
  • If I, for some reason, manually change the sourceURL of a note to "nytimes.com," even though the visible note info will appear identical to that of a note whose sourceURL is "http://www.nytimes.com" (they will both show "nytimes.com," at least on the Mac client), there is no sourceURL search that will return those two notes together

So, the request, in simple terms: Please let us search by domain. That means changing the search or the nature of the sourceURL field to recognize domains within URL strings and make them searchable terms. The end result would that that a search for "sourceURL:nytimes.com" would return all notes with the nytimes.com domain in the sourceURL field, regardless of what precedes it.

Here are other people explaining this problem or requesting the same thing (though on topics devoted to other subjects, which is why I started this one):

Yeah, this is driving me nuts. I really want the SourceURL to be indexed (and all hyperlinks). I sometimes remember the website I clipped information from, but have no idea of the actual text. Yes, I know I can use the SourceURL search, but that doesn't work that well. If I search for sourceURL:http://100buckschallenge.com* it'll find everything from that site, but I also have to search for sourceURL:http://www.100buckschallenge.com* (note the www) .. and what if I only remember part of the domain name? I would love to have an option to search the sourceurl just like any part of the note which I think is really important, and kind of the whole point of Evernote ... to find anything you've captured.

I was playing a bit with this today & IME, just like searching within the note body, it depends on the way the URL is composed. IE, the Lifehacker articles I have do not have the www in the url. But, that doesn't mean that someday there won't be some Lifehacker page I save that starts http://www.lifehacke...hing/something. And, that page will not show up with the others when doing a search on sourceURL:http://lifehacker.com - something to keep in mind when searching for particular URLs, if you're not finding what you think should be there.

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Agreed. Changing sourceurl: (and author:) to a contains search would be very useful, and, should not break any existing saved searches.

Unfortunately this would impact all 14 clients and the API.

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  • 6 months later...

I came to know just today that this feature is missing from Evernote. I used to think that whenever I type something in the search box it automatically searches everything i.e. the note title, body and the URL field for that text. But today when I typed in "fanfiction" in the search box, it brought only three notes even though I have clipped more pages from that site. Then I came to know that only those notes were produced which contained the term "fanfiction" in their title.

I really want evernote to have the feature of searching notes through Domain names. Sourceurl is not proving very useful for me. I save many articles from yahoo and they have various URL patterns like finance.yahoo.com or news.yahoo.com. So I just could not perform a search to return all notes from yahoo.com. Hence, this is a much required feature.

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I came to know just today that this feature is missing from Evernote. I used to think that whenever I type something in the search box it automatically searches everything i.e. the note title, body and the URL field for that text. But today when I typed in "fanfiction" in the search box, it brought only three notes even though I have clipped more pages from that site. Then I came to know that only those notes were produced which contained the term "fanfiction" in their title.

I really want evernote to have the feature of searching notes through Domain names. Sourceurl is not proving very useful for me. I save many articles from yahoo and they have various URL patterns like finance.yahoo.com or news.yahoo.com. So I just could not perform a search to return all notes from yahoo.com. Hence, this is a much required feature.

The best workaround, IMO, is to use 'fanfiction" as either a tag or a keyword in your clip.

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The best workaround, IMO, is to use 'fanfiction" as either a tag or a keyword in your clip.

That is what I am going to do now with my notes. I will put the name of the source website in the title of all notes. But I am sure there will be days when I forget to do that and will end up with notes that won't show up in search results. Besides it's time-consuming to do that. I would much prefer that Evernote makes it possible to search within URLs. Quite surprised that Evernote doesn't have this feature yet. I mean there is even the feature to search text within pictures. Compared to that, searching within URLs seems like a basic thing.

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  • 2 years later...

Also searching for this capability in the current version of EN... bugs me that I'm going to have to examine 100+ notes by hand to see which are "acceptable" clips from *.edu domains.

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  • 5 months later...
  • Level 5*

I may be missing something but Isnt operator [*] what you want? 

sourceurl:"*youtube.com*"

 

That won't work.  Evernote Search does not honor the * at the start of a string to match all characters.

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You didnt even try it, I am telling you that works for me,

 

...other thing would be I didnt understand what you are trying to do,

 

[*] does not match the beggining of a sentence but as you know, some special characters break the chain, like [.] or [/] and others

I have tried this in windows and I know what I am saying, if I want to search for specific URL like this post, then:

sourceurl:"https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/26052-request-domain-searching"

so if you want to look for domain, just use the [*] before and after this special characters, like this:

sourceurl:"*discussion.evernote.com*"

 

And please, before you say something cannot be done, please try it first, or if I am wrong at least give an explanation to make me see where am I wrong.

 

I am happy, no offenses here :)

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  • Level 5*

You didnt even try it, I am telling you that works for me,

 

...other thing would be I didnt understand what you are trying to do,

 

[*] does not match the beggining of a sentence but as you know, some special characters break the chain, like [.] or [/] and others

I have tried this in windows and I know what I am saying, if I want to search for specific URL like this post, then:

sourceurl:"https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/26052-request-domain-searching"

so if you want to look for domain, just use the [*] before and after this special characters, like this:

sourceurl:"*discussion.evernote.com*"

 

And please, before you say something cannot be done, please try it first, or if I am wrong at least give an explanation to make me see where am I wrong.

 

I am happy, no offenses here :)

 

Must be a difference between EN Win and EN Mac.

 

I did test it before I posted.

I have tested it on 3 different sites, and no notes are found when using the "*" prefix with sourceurl:

I almost never post a specific behavior without personally testing it immediately prior to posting, or having used it recently.

 

Please refrain from making accusations without factual data.  You had no way of knowing whether or not I tried it.

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  • Level 5*

My apologies, I didn't say I use Windows and assumed that work for both, I have never used MAC.

 

That is not a good assumption in general, and is really a bad assumption when it comes to the EN Search engine.

It appears that it works differently on different platforms/clients.

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  • Level 5*

 

I may be missing something but Isnt operator [*] what you want? 

sourceurl:"*youtube.com*"

 

This does work for the sourceurl parameter in Win EN.  You have to be sure and have the leading " and surround the seach with *'s.

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I may be missing something but Isnt operator [*] what you want? 

sourceurl:"*youtube.com*"

 

That won't work.  Evernote Search does not honor the * at the start of a string to match all characters.

 

 

 

 

My apologies, I didn't say I use Windows and assumed that work for both, I have never used MAC.

 

That is not a good assumption in general, and is really a bad assumption when it comes to the EN Search engine.

It appears that it works differently on different platforms/clients.

 

 

But this works both ways. When you categorically tell some that something doesn't work (on both platforms)... it's comparable to assuming that something works on both platforms. Both parties assumed that either Evernote did or did not do something across the board.

 

The difference being... one of the parties is way more on the defensive... and unnecessarily so. 

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  • Level 5*

Well, wasn't that exciting.  This thread was way too boring, so we definitely needed some off-topic BS to lively things up here.   ^_^

I'm not buying it, and I'm not taking the bait.

 

To get back on topic, let see if we can summarize what we know about Evernote Search:

  1. According to the official EN Search Grammar page,
    1. EN search is a "word" search, not a "character" search.
    2. While the grammar provides for a wildcard character, "*", at the end of a word, it does not provide for any wildcard characters at the beginning of a word.  See quote below.
  2. Apparently EN Search in the EN Win client is allowing a wildcard at the beginning of the word in "sourceurl:" searches
    1. This is not supported in EN Mac.
    2. It doesn't seem to be supported in the EN Web client (classic) either.
    3. The fact that the Search Grammar guide specifically disallows it, suggests that it may be a bug or design anomaly in EN Win
    4. Which means that the EN Win behavior could change with any update.

From the Evernote Search Grammar page:

Words may end in a wildcard to match the start of a word. Searches are not case sensitive. (A wildcard is only permitted at the end of the term, not at the beginning or middle for scalability reasons on the service.) 

 

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