More Robust Search in MeisterNote

Bart Verheecke · October 2022

The search function is too basic at the moment. Imagine you have five notes with the same title in different workspaces. The search function will list all of them, without any context so it's impossible to make a distinction between them. The context should be displayed in the search results.

Worse, if you include the title of a top note to your keyword search (to narrow the results down), no results are returned. As apparently, the search function does not include the bread crumb or title from the notes above. Including those would improve search a lot!

Another issue is that if you have multiple notes, let's say meeting minutes, with the date in the title, then the search function should return the most recent or most recently edited one. Now, it returns all of them in a completely random order and you need to hunt for the one with the most recent date yourself.

Miša Hennin · October 2022

Hi Bart and welcome to the Community!

Thanks for sharing your ideas for an improved search function - We've got great news! We agree that the search function is currently lacking and improvements are coming in the next release. Your feedback will be super valuable to us, so please feel free to share your thoughts again once we've released the improved search function. This way, we can keep working on it and implement the things that are still missing.

Thank you!

Emily · October 2022

I'm really pleased to hear about improvements coming! I'm using MeisterNote for teaching and I have so many notes for different classes. They can be quite difficult to search for, so I really know what you mean @Bart. Looking forward to seeing the new release @Miša!

Andrew Lapidus · November 2022

Hi @Bart and @Emily - the team has just released a first phase of improvements to MeisterNote's search feature. This release doesn't yet address all of the issues you mentioned, @Bart , but I hope that it can address at least a few.

This release made a significant update to our search algorithm - it should be much better at finding exact and partial matches of your search term. Crucially, the algorithm should get better with usage, placing more relevant notes higher on your list.

The new search interface also displays the titles of notes and sub-notes differently, hopefully making it easier to differentiate between them and understand which note you're working in. I'd be interested to hear if this helped your issue, @Bart. It's not the primary focus of this update - but hopefully this provides your searches with more context?

Another update to MeisterNote's search function should appear within a few weeks, so we'd love to hear your feedback on this one!

Best,

Andrew

Chris Cunliffe · April 2023

Hi,
Also, when searching a large note for keywords it would be good for the actual Note to be highlighted where the search items are found or to be able to select one and be taken to that item of text in the note itself.

Chris

Miša Hennin · April 2023

Hey @Chris C - I absolutely agree!! I always struggle with this.

Andrew Lapidus · April 2023

Hi all - just wanted to make a quick update on MeisterNote's search capabilities:

Along with the bread crumbs mentioned by @Bart Verheecke in the original post, we've also implemented some AI optimizations behind the scenes which should highlight more recently modified notes and relate search terms with other semantically linked terms.

I'll still leave this thread open, as the search function will certainly be an ongoing focus for improvement in the future.

As always, please share your feedback about these updates with our team below.

Best,

Andrew