In my vault I have lots of notes (10k+) including notes with the following titles:
Another way to see
(old) Another way to be a boss
I want to show this in another way
Not the way
When I search for “Not the way” in the quick switcher, the note with that exact title should appear first. BUT it appears below all those other ones. (The search highlights in bold the letters “nothe … way” in those note titles even though that shouldn’t be a good match.)
However, when I make notes with those titles in the sandbox vault, “Not the way” appears as the first result, as it should. Turning on sandbox mode in my main vault does not change anything, so not a community plugin screwing with things.
Any idea what is screwing with search? Is it just too many notes for Obsidian to handle?
I believe Quick Switcher doesn’t consider how close together the letters are (there’s a feature request asking for more sophisticated behavior). It might order “equivalent” results by creation date, tho. Did you create the Sandbox notes in the same order they were created in your vault? And/or are the results in your vault ordered by creation date?
Creation and modification dates of the notes are about the same for each, and in the Quick Switcher they are listed in reverse order for the three notes that appear first (newest to oldest) but the “Not the way” note which is the newest of all appears last. So that doesn’t seem to be it.
Are the notes in different folders? I don’t think that affects sort order (or at least it has never occurred to me before), but perhaps the whole path is being compared, which would push “Not the way” out of order if it’s in a deeper folder or one with a longer name. That could also explain the difference with the sandbox vault, if you just create them all in the vault root there.
I wish, but unfortunately “Not the way” is in root (the others are in folders). So if anything I’d expect root to be prioritized.
I fixed it by adding a space in “another” in the other note names: “ano ther”. Now they don’t show at all in quick search. Those are notes I don’t need to use quick search to look up so it works for me for now.
Very weird though that “nothe way” with a single t matches “not the way” (and is prioritized first) but “no the way” does not. I can only assume that there’s a quirk in the algorithm that ignores a missing repeated letter and then is showing the name with the shortest match first.
But the weirder thing is that “not the” never matches “another” in the sandbox.