Connections (Similar Notes) - as per nvUltra

Plugins ideas
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nvUltra is the successor note-taking app to nvAlt by Brett Terpstra. The app is still in beta and only downloadable for specially selected beta testers. Nevertheless, the manual is available online.

I started looking through it (https://nvultra.com/help/features) and came across the Connections feature. This what it does:

While working on a note, it may be helpful to see other notes on the same topic. That’s where Connections come in. When you toggle Connections mode, the entire contents of the note you’re working on are compared against the contents of all your other notes. The file list will show the notes with the most similarity and you can navigate them with the mouse or arrow keys.

Now that would be very useful to have in Obsidian, which would be an additional tool to Freelinking.

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Interesting, how would this be different than Unlinked mentions?

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Never used nvUltra as it’s in private beta. I’m curious how accurate the list is, it surely is helpful if it’s accurate. “Similar note” is such a subjective thing though; Evernote tried to do this with the help of AI, and yet it doesn’t seem to be that useful (at least I never heard many people rave about it). For example: https://www.reddit.com/r/Evernote/comments/dofliz/evernotes_ai_related_notes/

Last thought: might belong to plugin ideas rather than feature request.

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Agree with Silver. Good idea for plugin especially if you can actually extract valuable insights.

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its implemented in the DevonThink as a list (let say 10) most similar items, this is quite advanced and require computing something like similarity matrix when importing database (document is the most similar with itself)

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People have tried all sorts of things. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_similarity_detection
I too think this is perhaps best done separately.

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It’s also very computationally and I/O-wise expensive, might need to have a pre-indexed set which is what DevonThink does.

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@sam.baron Unlinked mentions are based on note titles only, as I understand it, whereas Connections/Similar Notes is based on titles + note content.

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@Silver How can we best move it to the plug-in side: I copy/paste my original text from here to there, or you move this whole thread over?

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Try edit the title, you should have the option to move it to “Plugin ideas”.

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@Silver: done !

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@Silver: a few years ago I used Evernote too, and the so-called “related notes” feature was useless, so I disabled it. Apparently it is still useless, as the Reddit commenter says. But could that indicate Evernote is not using the right technology.

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@Klaas: if this is indeed too complicated, perhaps this idea should be ditched.
@Silver: if you agree, please delete this page.

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This would be a very useful tool, perhaps if it is something which would be computationally heavy it is something that could be run on demand by the user, i.e. a ‘click this button to compare this note with existing notes’ button/command, alternatively it could have an option to run when a note saves or is opened

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@robotsheepboy Good points. In other words, it does not have to be running permanently when Obsidian is open, only when the user feels it is necessary, and then for a limited period.

What would be useful in such a setup would be that, when “Connections” (for want of a better name right now) is launched, that it checks all notes because sometimes one makes amendments to notes, which could unexpectedly also establish more similarity with other notes.

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You can get DevonThinks technology using DevonSphere Express — you can even invoke it from e.g. iA Writer and it works surprisingly well.

(Might be a FR: enable Obsidian to work with it, too.)

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I think the search engine that is used by this forum is good enough.

It saved me a lot of time from proposing ideas which is similar to the existed ones. Otherwise, I may have typed a lot of words in the post and finally find that the post is merged with other posts.

I think the plug-in can provide a list of the notes whose names are similar to the one the user is typing.