When using the Quick Switcher and Link Suggestion popups, results only show when the word order is correct. For example, If I am searching for the note “Introduction to Blender.md”, typing “Blender intro” will not land a result. Entering “int ble” / “in b” / etc works great (thanks fuzzy search!), but often we don’t remember the particular order of words in the note title.
In the search pane, results are found as expected, regardless of search term order.
Proposed solution
Allow for non-strict word order in the Quick Switcher / Link Suggestion popups.
Current workaround (optional)
Move to the search pane to find notes that aren’t showing up in the popup’s search results.
“For now, it’s designed like that on purpose. Including the reverse order (or any mixed ordering) makes the search results way too noisy (at least with fuzzy search), because now suddenly it’s matching a ton more things.
There might be other ways to add the reverse order though, like non-fuzzy
could consider that later”
But I wonder how problematic this additional noise would actually be? If results are too noisy, it just requires a bit more specificity, right? Of course I can’t test this, so perhaps it would indeed be unruly… but the problem exists that these searches require memorising the term order – While I think that “Blender Intro” really should find results for “Introduction to Blender”.
Current workaround (but nothing more) is to generate few permutations stored as aliases in YAML header. But that is feasible only for very small number of files or could be done programmatically.
Are there any updates to this idea. I run into this issue on a daily basis where I just remember the important keywords that I expect in the title but not their exact order. I even tried to use the Quick Switcher++ community plugin hoping it might have this feature, but it seems to work the same way as the core switcher, I started a discussion on it’s Github repo, hoping they might implement this. Currently the only workarounds I think work are to add the important keywords from the title as tags inside the note, and then search using tag: search option, or using the file: search option to search by file name only, which seems to not be limited by keyword order.
I frequently fail to find the file in quick switcher and then have to copy or retype the search terms into global search pane which is tolerant to word-order but also ignores text-level (filename = alias = chapter heading = … = marginal mention). This double effort is intrusive.
E.g. add new sorting option that prioritizes by text level (filename>=alias > chapter heading >…> marginal note). I.e. will first list results matching in filenames and aliases like current quick-switcher, then followed by results matching in file contents like current global search. Or e.g. display two columns, one corresponding to quick-switcher and one to ordinary results so I can click left or right to preferred match. Or …
This feature is crucial to me. How can we move ahead with this feature? I would like to see for myself if the results “will get too noisy”. An idea would be to implement it as an experimental feature for now, and then let the user have the option to switch it on in the settings menu. Then they can test for themselves. Let me also know if I can help implementing this feature!
This plugin is great, as it allows alternative to using [[ as well, as same problem there! Frequency and recency makes a big difference in constant false positives coming up.
When using the link suggestion popup to create a link to an existing note, the current fuzzy search algorithm is slightly too restrictive. It produces zero results for some very reasonable attempts at a match.
For example:
Where's my music collection note about [[The Ramones
does not match a note titled Ramones. (Did you know that’s the actual band name?)
Where's my recipe for [[how to cook spaghetti squash
does not match note how to make spaghetti squash
Problem: the current fuzzy search algorithm requires a match for all search terms, with no fallback to a less restrictive search.
Drawbacks: If I’m certain that my desired note exists, I have to try to remember what else I may have titled it and try again. If I’m not certain it already exists I may create a redundant note, wasting time and cluttering my note collection.
Requiring a match for all search terms makes sense for Obsidian’s file search engine but not for link suggestion. File search happens in a search box where users are intentionally constructing boolean queries. Link suggestion happens in the context of natural language. It’s a similar but distinct UX case.
Proposed solution
If there’s no match for all search terms, fall back to a match on fewer search terms. Results with more matching search terms rank higher.
Secondarily, results with longer matching search terms rank higher. (This is an optional but probably useful optimization for ranking ‘substance’ words higher than words like the and as of etc…)
Related feature requests
This pairs very well with @ShaneNZ’s feature request for when you want to link a phrase you’ve already written. The link suggestion UX for that case is currently broken, i.e. there is no link suggestion.
Is there any way to disable case matching when searching? I dont typically want to have to get the uppercase first letters of titles correct to find them, but that seems to be required.
Hmm, actually I’m not seeing case match being a requirement. Maybe I’m not understanding, or maybe you found a bug or an edge case. Can you give a specific example?
I would like to bump this thread. I’m also finding the search matching to be too restrictive.
I’m a transplant from roam, and the results are more intuitive.
Thanks for mentioning obsidian://show-plugin?id=obsidian-another-quick-switcher . Seems like a perfect solution on first look. It is also actively developed, last change 4 days ago.
is that plugin able to replace the default [[ dialogue to enable results for reverse ordered search terms? If so, can you tell me how to enable it… i can’t seem to find a setting to make it do so.
