Searching across notes, not necessarily in attached docs

[GeorgeBradford 0]

Hi Evernote community,

Without needing to search the contents of attached PDFs or Docs, how robust is the search function in and across notes collections?

For example, can a note be annotated with a particular hashtag so a general search across a complete library could return links to all notes containing such a hashtag, or is there another, more expedient way to find notes containing specific tags or combination of tags?

Thanks for helping a new comer.

-George

[DTLow 5,736]

On August 5, 2016 at 4:11 PM, GeorgeBradford said:

Without needing to search the contents of attached PDFs or Docs, how robust is the search function in and across notes collections?

For example, can a note be annotated with a particular hashtag so a general search across a complete library could return links to all notes containing such a hashtag, or is there another, more expedient way to find notes containing specific tags or combination of tags?

I find the EN search excellent, except that
- can't handle And/Or searches
- restricted to all/single notebooks
- EN creates an index for searching. This makes it fast, but it's not a true search.
   For example, the index rules exclude special characters.

The hashtag would work well, but I'm not sure why you'd use that instead of the built in Tag feature.
The EN search handles combinations of tags.

For more detailed information, you can access the link in my signature section for the Search Grammar

[CalS 5,280]

12 minutes ago, GeorgeBradford said:

Hi Evernote community,

Without needing to search the contents of attached PDFs or Docs, how robust is the search function in and across notes collections?

For example, can a note be annotated with a particular hashtag so a general search across a complete library could return links to all notes containing such a hashtag, or is there another, more expedient way to find notes containing specific tags or combination of tags?

Thanks for helping a new comer.

-George

The EN search function works well.  Searches start from the beginning of the word, so no in the word searches.  You can create your own hash tags if you like, though tags work very much the same way with better visibility of what tags/keywords you have created.  A bit of advice, if you opt for hashtags, I would recommend preceding them with an underscore, _.  Underscore is one of the few if not only special characters found by EN search.  This will eliminate false positives.

[gazumped 11,652]

IMHO you can (and should) trust search.  Your options for classifying notes include:

1. Title - my standard format <date><type><source><keywords>
2. Tags
3. Content
4. Hashtagging

I'm using a library of 21,000+ notes and rely mainly on the title and "intitle:<search>" searches.  Over time I've found it very useful that most 'official' documents - statements / receipts / invoices / insurances etc all have me down as an account number.  So a Content search for that reference with a Title date qualifier will usually find what I need.  Having a simple standard format for titles means I can apply it consistently and accurately.  The 'date' in there is in yyyymmdd format and is the date of the document,  not the date the note was created,  which is (usually) different.

Tags and -occasionally- Hashtags are used as an exclusion tool - when I'm searching and get too many hits,  I'll sometimes edit titles to be more precise,  or add keywords to the title.  If that's not feasible I'll tag unwanted hits to make it clearer that they're not wanted on voyage,  and easier to exclude them with a "-tag:<tag>" filter.

For really fine distinctions I'll use Hashtags - in my case Xwords - to filter further.