Optimizing Utility of Search - Possible Setting?

Feature archive
1

Use case or problem

  • There are two kinds of searchers
  1. People looking for a particular document to open it and read as a whole document
  2. People looking to read from a variety of documents IN the search results themselves

  • Currently the system is (mostly) set up for type 1 people

  • I am a type 2 person. If I search #bees( or any other search word/phrase), I would like to get a list of documents that includes the sections of the document containing #bees where each element of the list is readable.

  • This allows you to search and get essentially a summary of a given topic by extracting the text around the search term in all documents with that term.

  • Providing settings for what shows up in the search page would allow users to define how they want to use search.

Proposed solution

  • Implement a search setting where you can choose what you want to come up on the search page.

  • some examples are:

  1. Show only document titles
  2. Show the bit of text around where the search term was found
  3. Show all blocks/sections in all documents where those search terms were found

Current workaround (optional)

  • Search already currently does this, allowing you to see which part of the text it found your search term in, it just needs to be expanded as it doesn’t show enough text to be readable.

Thanks for reading :grinning:

5 Likes
2

Take a look at the search++ plug in. It allows you to look at a parameterized number of characters around a search term across your vault.

3

There is an expand context setting in the search panel already.

You can also use a variety of search parameters, including regular expressions, to gain a richer search experience. For instance, you can search for file:someNoteName to only find notes with someNoteName in the title.

Does that help?

4

Yes thank you!

5

Ooh thank you, I certainly will!

6

where may I find an exhaustive list of search parameters?

7

There may be some missing (tag:#sometag is one); the docs are under revision.

1 Like
8

I believe this should be already solved with the latest releases: