Can i Exclude a folder from full text-search?

What I’m trying to do

I want to save in obsidian a lot of extra stuff about news, entertainment, and similar. I’d like to mainly use a rss plugin to automatically load all that data in the vault, but i wouldn’t like to clog my vault, to make it slower, with lots of unwanted results in file search and in full-text search.

Things I have tried

I tried to build a different “extra” vault with this rss extra stuff, but then it is difficult to make links between my personal vault and the notes in this extra vault. I’d like to know if it is possible to have a kind of “hidden” folder in the vault that gets excluded from indexing, from full-text search, from file search, and similar.

Your best bet:

I never felt the need for this (yeah, some pics are regexed out for me, but otherwise I’d need all search results), but I’ve seen this a couple of Demo vaults I’ve downloaded in the past.
Search results are effectively excluded for files contained in the excluded folders, while in the Quick Switcher, they end up on the bottom, “greyed out” (using this term for the lack of a better one: they are in a less noticeable colour).

Now in the new version of Obsidian, you can even pick the folder from a menu, which is nice.

1 Like

I’ve used the Excluded files to exclude some files and folders, more specific to exclude the /MaDo folder which in my vault is a base folder holding all the template, scripts, queries (in file form), and so on, and some description on the meta-usage of my vault.

These are files I normally don’t want to link to, or have appear in my search result, so using Excluded files fits the bill, and moves them either out of, or at the very end of the search result.

1 Like

That’s ok, i’ll try that thing of “Excluded files”. However, i’d like to get advice also about performances issues in obsidian: do you think that getting so many notes (md files) in my vault could impair performances in some way ? For example, if everyday lots of new notes are added through rss, they’ll be indexed whenever i start obsidian, right?
Could this thing be addressed by using the “Excluded files” feature or it is just a solution for search results?

Thank u all

Markdown files are indexed by Obsidian. If you want, you can import txt files and they won’t be indexed and won’t be searchable either and won’t be queried. Of course those txt files can be mass renamed into md files again and then they will be available for searches and for backlinks, etc.

If you use the app in moderation (say you are not likely to go above 100k files) and you have a reasonably able PC, you can use the app no problem.

As for the last question, Exclude files refers to queries (FuzzyModal I think for QuickSwitcher), so the files are still going to be indexed.

I feel that note libraries, when large and old enough, need an “ARCHIVE” function to make it easier to automatically exclude them from the usual search action, and to make it easier to search only among them.

You can create an empty Archive folder somewhere now, add it to the Excluded folders, make a daily note about creating it and a task “look up automation techniques or Templater scripts to send material to Archive folder”. And when you have time, research it, but obviously it’s better to start out creating folders you know they’re not going to be long-term parts of the vault, or consider doing what I did: moved these to an auxiliary vault.