Search words with hyphens

When I search for my notes about admin-user I’d like to find “admin-user” as a contiguous string and not all instances of admin or user. There’s waaaay too many of those. Adding double quotes didn’t fix it.

Thanks for the feedback.

We expect to do an overhaul of Search at some point, and will fix this type of issue with that.

Kind regards,
Drew

This is a particular problem with short things on either side of the hyphen. “Admin-user” is a pretty good example (in the original post here). I’ll pile on with my own use-case from today (heh, there’s another one: “use-case”).

Today I had a need to do a global search for “SOW-7”. I needed to find references to the seventh Statement of Work for a client. Instead, all instances of “7” were found as well as any occurrence of “sow” in a word. We have an employee named “Sowmya”, so you can just imagine how useless this search was.

My notes include dates and times, as well as Zoom meeting IDs (as hyperlinks, so I can start a meeting from my daily Agenda template-based note). All those digits in my notes made for literally thousands of useless “matches”.

Quoting the search string (“SOW-7”) made no difference. Very frustrating.

Having been a developer, I get the underlying concerns (search indexes, performance, etc). However, from a text-based app user perspective, not being able to even force an inefficient search for something reasonable is a pretty major bummer. I literally have no way to find those notes now.

I’m afraid you hit the limitations of our current search. It basically only matches words and partial words with no punctuation, and we don’t yet have more advanced matching features like AND operators. We hope to improve on that in the search improvements mentioned in other posts in this thread.

What is the status of getting some improved search capabilities? I frequently run into the same problem already mentioned with wanting to search for strings containing dashes as well as wanting to search for a specific sequence of words like “sequence of words”. Would be great to have this feature.

Planned for second half of the year. So it is coming. It’s a bit project though, so can’t rush it in.

Great to hear. Thanks for the update.