I continue to struggle tremendously with the SN search functionality. Half the time, I can’t find anything and have to go looking for a parent card I remember to. I have outlined one idea for improved search here; i hope that’s still in the works, as I haven’t found the search additions from the 3.0 release beneficial unfortunately.
That aside, I struggle a lot with the search view itself. It is simply far too tiny to be fully useful. Here is a simple comparison of SN against other apps, with a consistent view size to compare them fairly.
As you can see, SN is dramatically behind in terms of simple ability to view and parse search results. That, combined with some of the search limitations makes for a very difficult experience. I love taking notes with SN, but the value of them after the fact is highly dependent on me being able to find them and do so quickly.
I hope you consider making improvements in this area.
Try filtering your home collection with a search term. Then the remaining visible cards will all have your search term highlighted in broadsheet, list, etc., view.
Thanks, I am aware of this functionality. Though not sure how it’s addresses the issue I have highlighted; If I am looking for a card with the search tool, the card is not among the ones visible to me.
Thanks for the ideas @fuzzy.beach. One thing to note is that whenever we try to improve something on Supernotes, one of our goals is to have “platform parity”, so that all improvements are shared across all platforms in order for the experience to be approximately the same at all times.
In this particular case, this means not including all possible data in order to keep search results as relevant and informative as possible while also keeping them concise, in order to show more results on a mobile device (rather than just one or two).
However, we understand that showing a bit more information (when the screen real-estate is available) might be nice, so we will look at improving this.
If there is any other metadata people feel is lacking from search results that is a must have for their use-case, please let us know
Hi @connor, thanks for the response. This is certainly understandable, platform-agnostic experience is important. That said, pretty much every app out there also has a mobile app available, so it isn’t impossible
In terms of metadata, I find that seeing tags would be helpful.
Re metadata including parents title would be nice, ie search for recipe pasta finds a card whose title or content or tags include pasta and whose parent’s title is recipes
As of 3.0.3, tags are now visible in Universal Search and parent names are included in the index. Both tags and parent names are now highlighted when they match a search term. Marking this implemented!
@Connor This is excellent, and almost completely solves my feature request from Improved search. Thank you!
I think the only part that’s still missing is grandparent-context search. But even without that, this new parent search is a huge improvement, and will remove the need for my Card name | parent card name naming pattern that I’ve been forced to use since day one.
@connor, These are fantastic improvements, thank you! I think something I didn’t communicate well in the original request was regarding the actual size of the search modal If it were just a bit longer/wider on desktop, i think it would super beneficial, allowing to see more results! It’s done really well on mobile.
Thanks for reminding me about that post – have updated! And yeah, still not doing grandparents because we don’t actually show grandparents directly in search results (or anywhere else on the platform) so things could start to get very confusing when trying to differentiate between parents and grandparents. Also, because in order to justify adding just 1 level of parent names to the index we had to eke out some performance improvements in other parts of the indexing process, going any more layers deeper will start to get more and more expensive. But as with everything, if we can figure out a way to do it that effectively generalizes to N levels of parents (as we’ve done in reverse with view depth), we will.
Yep, understood. Having a preview as well as the additional meta could certainly be useful. We’re still not 100% sure we want to go down that path, but will definitely keep it in mind as we continue to improve search
If it were just a bit longer/wider on desktop, i think it would super beneficial, allowing to see more results! It’s done really well on mobile.