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(Archived) Search body of note ONLY?


EdH

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  • Level 5*

Is there a way to ONLY search the body of the note and not file attachments? There is so much pollution in my searches now that Office documents are searched by default. A lot of files we use have lookup tables, so searching for a product is worthless because several files have a full listing of ALL products we carry, but are 100% irrelevant to a given search.

 

If not, can a flag be added to a future version so only the note body text is searched so we can effectively turn off file content search?

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Can't think of any way but curating notes as an ongoing exercise..  when you do find the item you need (after discarding all the dross),  tag it for easier finding in future..

 

Agreed though that a way to search body only or attachments only would be useful...

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Can't think of any way but curating notes as an ongoing exercise..  when you do find the item you need (after discarding all the dross),  tag it for easier finding in future..

 

Agreed though that a way to search body only or attachments only would be useful...

I cannot discard the dross. It isn't dross, it just pollutes every single search. Sometimes I want it, but most I don't. Even if I never want it in the search, I need to keep the content. It isn't just a table of data, it is a form with valuable info that has a tab with the table that is horking things up.

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  • Level 5*

I hope the Evernote design team will consider that the more information we store, the more ways we need to filter that information.  If you have ever dealt with large databases then you will be keenly aware of this.

 

Since Evernote professes to be a 100-year company, and has marketed their product as something to be used our entire lives, each of us will eventually reach the point where we have massive amounts of data.  And, the more different types of stuff we put into Evernote (pics, PDFs, Office docs) the more we need to filter it out sometimes, or conversely, search ONLY in attached documents.

 

The OP's use case is a prime example.

 

So, Evernote team, please give us a more flexible Search engine, where it is easy to include or exclude any field from the general global search.  Having a fully supported boolean logic would also be very useful, and contrary to objections I have seen, I believe that the users who need it will be able to understand and use it easily enough.

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I've already been using other search options (HoudahSpot, Spotlight, and EasyFind 2) to find things on the Mac. It's wonderful that Evernote is set up to make it easy to search from outside the app as well, but ideally we'd have ever greater search functionality built into the app and available on every platform.

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  • 7 months later...

I'd just like to bring this topic back up...I agree with the original poster, now that I am attaching more and more office docs and PDFs, it would be very useful to be able to search for terms in the body of the note only.

 

I'm using a MAC, perhaps there is a way to do this with an applescript.  If I figure out any such work around I'll post back here.

 

(PS: I stumbled across this post via a forum search and didn't notice that it was in the "Windows" section....The "MAC" comment is out of place here, sorry)

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I'd just like to bring this topic back up...I agree with the original poster, now that I am attaching more and more office docs and PDFs, it would be very useful to be able to search for terms in the body of the note only.

 

+1

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  • 1 month later...
  • Level 5*

You can try:

evernote -intitle:evernote

 

Disclaimer: In title search will still find titles like "evernote_product" and "Evernote's Products".

Tested on Evernote for Mac by an Evernote employee.

That's not what was asked for. The original poster is looking for a way to search a note without searching its attachments, as opposed to not searching the title. I don't know of any way to do that.
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  • Level 5

I don't know how feasable a search grammar addition is or isn't at this point.
Another way of perhaps getting there (poll for kluginess, before refining into a feature request):

Assume a note had a desired keyword both in the note and in an attached document in the note.

Currently you'll get a note in the search results if the keyword is in the body, or the application, or both.

What if instead, you got two hits (sub-optimal but it then is leveragable with the search grammar), one hit based on the body and one based on the attachments.
Then you could add an -resource:application/* and filter out all the notes with attachments.
As it stands now, that will filter out the search results you're looking for in the body, just because they have an attachment (with or without that keyword).

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  • Level 5

In the land of checkboxes, we can search on: todo:* -todo:false

giving us a result that "has checkboxes, but no unchecked ones".

 

I'm still nursing my morning coffee and in half grok mode.

I'm not missing an obvious combo here am I with resources?

 

I think the limit is we can only filter on the presence and type of the resource, not differentiate where the hit is found.

 

I notice my Evernote search cheatsheet is out of date where it says "This will search the body, title, and tag attributes".

I guess we need a "pretend I'm not Premium" search flag to exclude the documents (not that that helps for pdf's)

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  • Level 5*

The multi-step process could be something like:

1: do your normal search (<blah>"). This brings in way too much, granted.

2: tag these notes with a special tag (e.h. '#hack#')

3: do the same search with any: -resource:* -intitle:<blah> -tag:<blah>

4: remove the special tag from these

5: now repeat the original search with the added tag: <blah> tag:#hack#

Even if it works, ewwwwww.....

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  • Level 5*

 

You can try:

evernote -intitle:evernote

 

Disclaimer: In title search will still find titles like "evernote_product" and "Evernote's Products".

Tested on Evernote for Mac by an Evernote employee.

That's not what was asked for. The original poster is looking for a way to search a note without searching its attachments, as opposed to not searching the title. I don't know of any way to do that.

 

 

Agreed. Would need -inbody: or -excludeattachment: or something.

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  • Level 5*

 

multi-step process

oh, oh, we could have shortcut list clickable Macro/script support to do that.  What could go wrong...

 

 

Or, we could have a development team that listens to users and helps to avoid or work around unintended consequences to new features. This has really destroyed my ability to effectively search notes many at work.It blows my mind they can unzip an office document and explode out the XML data, index it, and search through it and don't then provide a way to exclude it from a search.  :angry: I guess removing the toolbar from EN5 took precedence though.

And no, I'm not bitter.

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This would be SOOOOOO useful. Often, an old thread is just so much clutter, but this one is useful and the fact that it just creates so much search noise.... well... you would think that a company that prides itself on saving everything would provide better mechanisms for retrieving that data. This one problem is actually glaring when you think about it. There are just sooo many words in external docs that the collisions happen all the time. 

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