Search question - How to search for words in both title and aliases

Help
1

Let’s say I have a file with this title: tips to visit a new location

If in the search bar I write: file:(tip country) I won’t find the file

So I decided to add in the property aliases the following words: country place city

Unfortunately file: searches only on the title, while I would like to search both on title and aliases.

I tried some weird combinations of commands like (file: OR ["aliases":])(tip country) but they don’t work

Is there any way to search in both title and aliases? Is there any better alternative than using aliases?

As an alternative I thought to write the title as: tips to visit a new location (country, place, city) but that would be a mess if I do it for every note.

2

I wonder if it is just the way you typed the syntax? I don’t see that pattern of splitting the brackets like that in the help docs. This test worked for me for a note with an alias “Valles Marineris”

[aliases:Valles Marineris]

file:Mars OR [aliases:Valles Marineris]

Or a partial search of an alias:

[aliases:Valles]

[aliases:V]

or using quotes to make it exact (or exact partial):

[aliases:"Valles"]

1 Like
3

Thank you for the answer. I think that for now I would structure my file like this:

  • title: tips to visit a new location
  • aliases: tips to visit a new (country place city)

In case I want to search for it and the words that come to my mind are tip country I would write in the search bar: [aliases:tip country] OR file:(tip country)

Anyway I would still like to have the possibility to search in both aliases and title without having to write a poem everytime.
The Quick Switcher allows to do so but the words order matters and for this reason it is unreliable. For example if I write in the Quick Switcher tip country it would find the file but if I write country tip it won’t find the file

4

Another Quick Switcher is a plugin that supports fuzzy search. Although you might have to install rg or fzf to support it.

The Obsidian Roadmap also has some upcoming feature on search relevance. So maybe we’ll get some different ways of searching in a future update.

(That’s all I can think of for now.)

1 Like
5

Thank you :slight_smile: I will look into that plugin