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How Do I Search Text in the Title ONLY?


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I am using Evernote 5 on a Windows PC and can't seem to figure out how to search for text in the title only.

 

Example:

 

I have a number of notes with titles that start with my husband's name...and his name is David.  So the title might be something like "David: Strengths Finder Results" or "David: email thread with Sandy on 4/13/13"

 

I do NOT want to run a search for all my notes containing his name (I have TONS!); only the title.  So I want to search for "David:" in the title only.

 

Can I do that?  If so, please tell me how!

 

Thanks!

Sharon Hillam

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Okay...that helped.  But can I narrow it down a bit?

 

I want to be able to search for "David:" at the beginning of the note ONLY.  I tried typing: intitle:"David:" and that didn't work.  Any suggestions?

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Okay...that helped.  But can I narrow it down a bit?

 

I want to be able to search for "David:" at the beginning of the note ONLY.  I tried typing: intitle:"David:" and that didn't work.  Any suggestions?

EN searches only on words. An Evernote word consists of consecutive letters, numbers & the underscore. Everything else is a delimiter. Some people have luck with enclosing special characters in quotes a la "David:". IME, that is not reliable. You may want to use a tag or notebook for the notes pertaining only to your husband.

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Okay...not happy to hear this, but yes, looks like I'm going to have to do more with Notebooks and Tags.  The only problem with finding this out (that I can't do an intitle search for only the beginning of the title) is that I've coded almost every single note I have in EN using this scheme...and it goes WAY beyond just notes for my husband.

 

As powerful as Evernote is—and I think it's amazing!—this is a HUGE disappointment for me!  Glad I only have 662 notes so far rather than thousands to "rethink".  :-(

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Okay...not happy to hear this, but yes, looks like I'm going to have to do more with Notebooks and Tags.  The only problem with finding this out (that I can't do an intitle search for only the beginning of the title) is that I've coded almost every single note I have in EN using this scheme...and it goes WAY beyond just notes for my husband.

 

As powerful as Evernote is—and I think it's amazing!—this is a HUGE disappointment for me!  Glad I only have 662 notes so far rather than thousands to "rethink".  :-(

 

I don't understand why this isn't working. If you type this (no quotation marks), what happens?

 

intitle:David

 

What happens if you use quotation marks?

 

intitle:"David"

 

Both of these should work fine if the name is at the beginning of a phrase in the title.

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Okay...not happy to hear this, but yes, looks like I'm going to have to do more with Notebooks and Tags.  The only problem with finding this out (that I can't do an intitle search for only the beginning of the title) is that I've coded almost every single note I have in EN using this scheme...and it goes WAY beyond just notes for my husband.

 

As powerful as Evernote is—and I think it's amazing!—this is a HUGE disappointment for me!  Glad I only have 662 notes so far rather than thousands to "rethink".  :-(

Simply do the intitle:David search & sort the results by title. Every note that has a title beginning with David: will be together.

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Okay...not happy to hear this, but yes, looks like I'm going to have to do more with Notebooks and Tags. The only problem with finding this out (that I can't do an intitle search for only the beginning of the title) is that I've coded almost every single note I have in EN using this scheme...and it goes WAY beyond just notes for my husband.

As powerful as Evernote is—and I think it's amazing!—this is a HUGE disappointment for me! Glad I only have 662 notes so far rather than thousands to "rethink". :-(

I don't understand why this isn't working. If you type this (no quotation marks), what happens?

intitle:David

What happens if you use quotation marks?

intitle:"David"

Both of these should work fine if the name is at the beginning of a phrase in the title.

She's trying to include the colon in order to refine the search results to exclude notes that have David elsewhere in the title. (I think.)

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Okay...not happy to hear this, but yes, looks like I'm going to have to do more with Notebooks and Tags. The only problem with finding this out (that I can't do an intitle search for only the beginning of the title) is that I've coded almost every single note I have in EN using this scheme...and it goes WAY beyond just notes for my husband.

As powerful as Evernote is—and I think it's amazing!—this is a HUGE disappointment for me! Glad I only have 662 notes so far rather than thousands to "rethink". :-(

I don't understand why this isn't working. If you type this (no quotation marks), what happens?

intitle:David

What happens if you use quotation marks?

intitle:"David"

Both of these should work fine if the name is at the beginning of a phrase in the title.

She's trying to include the colon in order to refine the search results to exclude notes that have David elsewhere in the title. (I think.)

I haven't tested it, but I do wonder if words connected to the colon might be throwing off the search, because intitle is an exact search on most clients and will not find, for example, Davids with a search for intitle:David. A search for intitle:david* with the wildcard might help. However, as you said, if she is looking for just notes with david at the very beginning of the title then she is out of luck.

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I haven't tested it, but I do wonder if words connected to the colon might be throwing off the search, because intitle is an exact search on most clients and will not find, for example, Davids with a search for intitle:David. A search for intitle:david* with the wildcard might help. However, as you said, if she is looking for just notes with david at the very beginning of the title then she is out of luck.

IME, using quotes to search for special characters is iffy at best & certainly not reliable. I just tested this again. Intitle:"test:" (with the colon) does not exclude notes with test (not followed by a colon) in the title. I just tried this on both the web & Windows clients.

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Okay...not happy to hear this, but yes, looks like I'm going to have to do more with Notebooks and Tags. The only problem with finding this out (that I can't do an intitle search for only the beginning of the title) is that I've coded almost every single note I have in EN using this scheme...and it goes WAY beyond just notes for my husband.

As powerful as Evernote is—and I think it's amazing!—this is a HUGE disappointment for me! Glad I only have 662 notes so far rather than thousands to "rethink". :-(

I don't understand why this isn't working. If you type this (no quotation marks), what happens?

intitle:David

What happens if you use quotation marks?

intitle:"David"

Both of these should work fine if the name is at the beginning of a phrase in the title.

She's trying to include the colon in order to refine the search results to exclude notes that have David elsewhere in the title. (I think.)

 

That is correct.  And you are also correct in that it makes no difference whether I type intitle:David or intitle:"David:"...the search finds 14 notes, all with David in the title, but not ONLY the two I actually want.  So...in my particular situation, I'm just going to create a new Notebook and move the two notes I want from a general "catch-all" notebook to the new notebook.  I will be adding lots more notes, in time.  And will keep this in mind...that I can't extract (search for) notes simply by using the beginning "label."  I appreciate all the input here.  Thanks again, everyone!

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Did you read my post #10? At least that way, you are able to idenify the notes beginning with David:

 

Yes, that's what I was doing.  My search was bringing up 14 notes from my Archives notebook and I could easily scroll down and find the two starting with "David:" somewhere in the middle.  No big deal for no more notes than that.

 

However, I'm in the process of migrating old emails, documents, and LOTS of things into Evernote.  I expect to have thousands of notes in EN before I'm done!

 

And now that I've learned that I can't simply search for what I call the label (the first word or phrase in the title that ends with a colon)...it's forcing me to rethink how I want to organize and code my notes.  I mean...what's the point in putting everything into Evernote if I can't easily extract what I want?  And for me, that also includes making sure I don't have tons of notes to wade through on a given search because I didn't get specific enough with either my tags or how I coded the title.

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Yes, that's what I was doing. My search was bringing up 14 notes from my Archives notebook and I could easily scroll down and find the two starting with "David:" somewhere in the middle. No big deal for no more notes than that.

However, I'm in the process of migrating old emails, documents, and LOTS of things into Evernote. I expect to have thousands of notes in EN before I'm done!

And now that I've learned that I can't simply search for what I call the label (the first word or phrase in the title that ends with a colon)...it's forcing me to rethink how I want to organize and code my notes. I mean...what's the point in putting everything into Evernote if I can't easily extract what I want? And for me, that also includes making sure I don't have tons of notes to wade through on a given search because I didn't get specific enough with either my tags or how I coded the title.

IME, it's very easy to retrieve notes if you utilize stacks, notebooks, tags, keywords & descriptive titles & I have over 62,000 notes in my main account.

http://discussion.evernote.com/topic/48737-simple-powerful-obvious-and-missing-from-evernote/?p=246668

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Did you read my post #10? At least that way, you are able to idenify the notes beginning with David:

 

Yes, that's what I was doing.  My search was bringing up 14 notes from my Archives notebook and I could easily scroll down and find the two starting with "David:" somewhere in the middle.  No big deal for no more notes than that.

 

However, I'm in the process of migrating old emails, documents, and LOTS of things into Evernote.  I expect to have thousands of notes in EN before I'm done!

 

And now that I've learned that I can't simply search for what I call the label (the first word or phrase in the title that ends with a colon)...it's forcing me to rethink how I want to organize and code my notes.  I mean...what's the point in putting everything into Evernote if I can't easily extract what I want?  And for me, that also includes making sure I don't have tons of notes to wade through on a given search because I didn't get specific enough with either my tags or how I coded the title.

 

 

I have a system that works without notebooks or tags.

http://www.christopher-mayo.com/?p=367

 

If I want to be precise with my system, I can do combinations of searches. For example, if you and David went to New York in September last year and you are looking for notes related to that, you could type in the following parameters and probably arrive at a very small number of notes.

 

intitle:david intitle:1309* "new york" 

 

I prefer to put as little time as possible into organizing on the front end. I just want everything in there, and I trust that I can find it with the advanced searches. It has worked pretty well for a few years now. Some people prefer to have a detailed organizational system on the front end that filters everything as it comes into their accounts. That's fine, of course, but I have gradually dropped notebooks and tags because I've found I just don't need them. I'd recommend that if you do use them, you read some of the advice on the forums and limit the amount you use in the beginning. 

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Did you read my post #10? At least that way, you are able to idenify the notes beginning with David:

 

Yes, that's what I was doing.  My search was bringing up 14 notes from my Archives notebook and I could easily scroll down and find the two starting with "David:" somewhere in the middle.  No big deal for no more notes than that.

 

However, I'm in the process of migrating old emails, documents, and LOTS of things into Evernote.  I expect to have thousands of notes in EN before I'm done!

 

And now that I've learned that I can't simply search for what I call the label (the first word or phrase in the title that ends with a colon)...it's forcing me to rethink how I want to organize and code my notes.  I mean...what's the point in putting everything into Evernote if I can't easily extract what I want?  And for me, that also includes making sure I don't have tons of notes to wade through on a given search because I didn't get specific enough with either my tags or how I coded the title.

 

 

I have a system that works without notebooks or tags.

http://www.christopher-mayo.com/?p=367

 

If I want to be precise with my system, I can do combinations of searches. For example, if you and David went to New York in September last year and you are looking for notes related to that, you could type in the following parameters and probably arrive at a very small number of notes.

 

intitle:david intitle:1309* "new york" 

 

I prefer to put as little time as possible into organizing on the front end. I just want everything in there, and I trust that I can find it with the advanced searches. It has worked pretty well for a few years now. Some people prefer to have a detailed organizational system on the front end that filters everything as it comes into their accounts. That's fine, of course, but I have gradually dropped notebooks and tags because I've found I just don't need them. I'd recommend that if you do use them, you read some of the advice on the forums and limit the amount you use in the beginning. 

 

 

Thanks, Christopher.  I've been somewhat following your philosophy already in that I have very few notebooks or tags and was structuring my EN database in such a way as to rely heavily on using searches.  But until this morning, I didn't realize how much of a novice I am when it comes to advanced searches...and it threw me!  Guess I better spend a bit more time extracting stuff out of EN rather than spending all my time dumping stuff in it! 

 

And, too, some of what I hit this morning has more to do with my personal preferences rather than a major flaw with Evernote.  I was just surprised that I couldn't simply search for "David:" in the title (once you guys told me about the intitle parameter) and get ONLY those notes.  Oh well...guess that just means EN isn't perfect...yet!  :)

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Did you read my post #10? At least that way, you are able to idenify the notes beginning with David:

 

Yes, that's what I was doing.  My search was bringing up 14 notes from my Archives notebook and I could easily scroll down and find the two starting with "David:" somewhere in the middle.  No big deal for no more notes than that.

 

However, I'm in the process of migrating old emails, documents, and LOTS of things into Evernote.  I expect to have thousands of notes in EN before I'm done!

 

And now that I've learned that I can't simply search for what I call the label (the first word or phrase in the title that ends with a colon)...it's forcing me to rethink how I want to organize and code my notes.  I mean...what's the point in putting everything into Evernote if I can't easily extract what I want?  And for me, that also includes making sure I don't have tons of notes to wade through on a given search because I didn't get specific enough with either my tags or how I coded the title.

 

 

I have a system that works without notebooks or tags.

http://www.christopher-mayo.com/?p=367

 

If I want to be precise with my system, I can do combinations of searches. For example, if you and David went to New York in September last year and you are looking for notes related to that, you could type in the following parameters and probably arrive at a very small number of notes.

 

intitle:david intitle:1309* "new york" 

 

I prefer to put as little time as possible into organizing on the front end. I just want everything in there, and I trust that I can find it with the advanced searches. It has worked pretty well for a few years now. Some people prefer to have a detailed organizational system on the front end that filters everything as it comes into their accounts. That's fine, of course, but I have gradually dropped notebooks and tags because I've found I just don't need them. I'd recommend that if you do use them, you read some of the advice on the forums and limit the amount you use in the beginning. 

 

 

Thanks, Christopher.  I've been somewhat following your philosophy already in that I have very few notebooks or tags and was structuring my EN database in such a way as to rely heavily on using searches.  But until this morning, I didn't realize how much of a novice I am when it comes to advanced searches...and it threw me!  Guess I better spend a bit more time extracting stuff out of EN rather than spending all my time dumping stuff in it! 

 

And, too, some of what I hit this morning has more to do with my personal preferences rather than a major flaw with Evernote.  I was just surprised that I couldn't simply search for "David:" in the title (once you guys told me about the intitle parameter) and get ONLY those notes.  Oh well...guess that just means EN isn't perfect...yet!  :)

 

 

I think that getting familiar with the search parameters really helps a lot when you set out organizing. For example, you might have three notebooks: inbox, personal, and professional. Then, you might only need a few tags within there (david, tax, receipt, etc.). Knowing that search can cover everything else saves a lot of work.

 

I would start by throwing everything into Evernote (why wait?) and then sorting things as you go along into broad categories (personal and professional). Add tags as you go along to achieve finer sorting, but honestly, they become redundant for a lot of my needs. For example, why label something a receipt if you know you are looking for that receipt from sometime back in august? In my case, just look for everything made in August with attachments. I'll probably only get ten or fifteen things, I scroll down, and there it is. Of course, I could have everything finely sorted with tags, but why go to all of that effort if it isn't needed?

 

There are cases when you know ahead of time that you will need something (all of your receipts and paperwork for taxes every year), and I think this would be when tags would be handy, because you will have to have it all in one place at some point. However, this kind of stuff, at least in my life, is surprisingly rare, and handled quite easily with note links, if I need anything at all.

 

Anyhow, let us know how your adventure turns out!

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  • 1 month later...

I found this thread when trying to solve the same problem. Not sure if someone else suggested this, but I would not do intitle search for david. instead, I would search for another word I know is in the title and then sort by title (A>Z) and scroll to David. The more specific you can be with your search, the fewer notes you'll have to scroll. Without knowing about intitle search, I have been able to find pdf within the 26000 notes in my science account by searching for topic and then scrolling to author's last name in the list of retrieved notes. Alternatively, you could tag David notes with David and search within David-tagged notes.

 

I have changed my organization multiple times to improve my ability to find papers when I need them. The improved search functions and more portable computers that lessen my reliance on mobile (stripped-down) versions of evernote means I don't need stacks and notebooks. I can tag papers I am using for a project and then delete the tag when I don't need it anymore.

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  • 2 years later...

I am also frustrated by Evernote's search function. As far as I've seen, Evernote is the only search that doesn't organize search results based on word placement or title first. It makes sense that if I'm going to search for something the first things that should come up are things with the search phrase in the title, then in the body of the document. I shouldn't have to add "intitle:" to my search to get it to find the title first. This has been very frustrating for me as well because my brain works in the same way. I should be able to type a word or phrase in the search box and find notes with those words in the tittle without having to remember different search phrases or enter special tricks to compensate for the lack of functionality. I've been using Evernote since the beginning and paying for premium in an effort to help it grow. I have seen progress but some things seem to be lacking still and instead of fixing the issues, they offer you work-a-rounds that make things take longer or harder to accomplish. 

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14 minutes ago, WolfChild said:

I am also frustrated by Evernote's search function. As far as I've seen, Evernote is the only search that doesn't organize search results based on word placement or title first.

You're posting in a long past discussion where help was asked for and answered

The Mac platform has a "sort by relevance" that I don't use because I'm not clear on what relevance means
You're saying it's "search results based on word placement or title first" but that's not clear

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7 hours ago, DTLow said:

You're posting in a long past discussion where help was asked for and answered

The Mac platform has a "sort by relevance" that I don't use because I'm not clear on what relevance means
You're saying it's "search results based on word placement or title first" but that's not clear

 

I am aware that this post is older, but it's been 3 years since this was posted and there is not a real solution to this issues of the search being overly complex. Use more tags and add these extra words are a workaround but not really a solution.

What I meant by search results based on word placement and/or title first is this, I have a note titled "cars I want". I type "car" in the search box without the quotes and it brings up every single note that has those three letters in that order in any place in the note, title, or tags. So I get a long list of completely irrelevant notes, that are not the one note that has just "Car" in the title.

It seems ridiculous that I should have to add a special phrase to get Evernote to find that one note and only that one note. If I type the extra "intitle:" part, yes, of course I get the note I was looking for, but that's my point. I should have to add that something extra to find what I am looking for. Whenever there is a search box on a website or in another program you type a word or phrase and it will bring results showing your word or phrase that appear in the title area first and the body of the document or website or whatever it is your searching second. 

If my post here is not relevant then I apologize for that. Also, I am not meaning to be rude or sound rude, I am simply trying to express my issues with the search function. 

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  • 2 months later...

I totally agree with WolfChild that this is a feature you would expect as default, without any hidden/overly complicated workaround (typing 'intitle:' each time is really not very practical, especially if you want to search by title match several times a day). Or at least notes should be displayed in the autosuggest. Seeing the notes titles that fit the search query more closely would be more useful to me than seeing generic "suggestions", or "tags". 

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On 2017-03-19 at 5:42 PM, WolfChild said:

It seems ridiculous that I should have to add a special phrase 

 

49 minutes ago, LucaBen said:

I totally agree with WolfChild that this is a feature you would expect as default, without any hidden/overly complicated workaround (typing 'intitle:' each time is really not very practical

Either of you are welcome to submit  a feature request in the requests forum at https://discussion.evernote.com/forum/304-evernote-feature-requests/

I think you're wrong about having intitle as the default, however Evernote could make design changes so user's aren't presented with a blank search box.  

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25 minutes ago, DTLow said:

I think you're wrong about having intitle as the default, however Evernote could make design changes so user's aren't presented with a blank search box.  

I appreciate you providing the link, but apparently there's at least three feature requests on this topic already: 

 

This is clearly a sign that many people are having problems with the way search works on Evernote, so I hope you guys are going to take this request seriously into consideration. As I've already mentioned in the first thread quoted here, I do understand why you are saying titles should not be the default results, but I do think that 1) they should come up as top recommendations in the autosuggest pane  2) they should be included as search criteria ("search title only", sort of - without the need to type a syntax). Thanks 

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It's also important to point out that right now, if I have a note that includes the word "travels" and search for "intitle:travel", that note is not going to be included in the search results, as one would expect. I know there's a way around it, but it's ways too complicated, the UI should be simple and work as expected, I'll never use UNIX-like commands for a simple search, Evernote is just one of the many tools that I use on a daily basis. 

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43 minutes ago, LucaBen said:

I appreciate you providing the link, but apparently there's at least three feature requests on this topic already: 

The you should add your vote to the existing feature requests.

 

41 minutes ago, LucaBen said:

It's also important to point out that right now, if I have a note that includes the word "travels" and search for "intitle:travel", that note is not going to be included in the search results, as one would expect.

One would expect that the search would work as documented. You're explicitly asking for a search of title only (so you already know what "intitle:" should do), and you expect that it will also search the body of the note?

 

40 minutes ago, LucaBen said:

the UI should be simple and work as expected

As who expects?

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If people are pointing out that there's a problem, it means that they are having a problem. Are you guys going to listen and help with that, or keep pushing suggestions as if there's something wrong with us thinking that the way it works is counterintuitive? There already 3+ topics on this, and people are highlighting the key issues, let me remind you once more:

1. Searching notes that match the search query by title should be a cup of cake, since titles are higher level entities than notes content, so we would find it tremendously useful to have an easy way to do that, without typing in weird syntax such as "intitle". 

2. (in response to the above comment): If a note has the word "travels" in the title, and you type in "intitle:travel", that note is not included in the search results. Since the human brain is not a machine, good search engines are designed to be flexible. That why they've invented specific technologies to handle that, such as controlled vocabularies. There's great search engines out there that understand what people need by speaking their language (google, amazon), and there's also inefficient search engines such as the one on Spotify, to mention one, where missing a character or making a simple typo is enough for the search engine to come up with no results. Evernote looks more like the second type, right now. I hope I don't need to quote some book on human-computer interaction so you guys agree with me on this.

I am seriously considering a migration of all my notes from Evernote to Scrivener, because search on Scrivener is so much more powerful and efficient. I believe this should have already be added to the backlog of new features, and am quite disappointed by the fact that there's still been no progress on this. 

I appreciate you guys reading and replying to our comments, but please try to understand that people coming here are already quite frustrated because the software doesn't work as they would like, so it's twice as much frustrating if their comments are not been examined with the attention they deserve. Cheers

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3 hours ago, LucaBen said:

Are you guys going to listen and help with that

This is a user discussion forum, and we're all users here
The original OP asked "How Do I Search Text in the Title ONLY?"
I'm thinking the question was answered and the OP was helped

We can help if you have other questions
Otherwise, if you have feature requests, you should be posting elsewhere

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  • 8 months later...
Please explain to me why when I clearly have two notes with the word “Adderal” in the title, do I only get one that shows up when I do a search? Fascinated.
 
They say doing a search with the “intitle: [search term]” works but I still have the same problem. (see attached screen shots)

5a74dd52ea255_ScreenShot2018-02-02at2_49_19PM.png.d139c22a64fd83e85187e93a454c638f.png

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On 2018-02-02 at 1:52 PM, Justinbankhead said:
Please explain to me why when I clearly have two notes with the word “Adderal” in the title, do I only get one that shows up when I do a search? Fascinated.
 
They say doing a search with the “intitle: [search term]” works but I still have the same problem. (see attached screen shots)

I'd suspect the search index is incomplete and needs to be rebuilt5a791c7c14cfb_ScreenShot2018-02-05at19_08_22.png.56424f2c63c93c52f86b1c66ebc23d11.png

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1 minute ago, Justinbankhead said:

@dtlow I don't see this option under my Help tab. I'm on a mac, does that make a difference? I also searched how to recreate text search and nothing comes up like that.

Hold down the option key when clicking the help menu

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20 hours ago, Justinbankhead said:

@dtlow I don't see this option under my Help tab. I'm on a mac, does that make a difference? I also searched how to recreate text search and nothing comes up like that.

Ctrl-Help on the PC.

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