How to Search Evernote
Updated Dec 16 2009
I’ve been particularly dense about figuring this out, so, having stumbled upon it, I thought I’d share it with anyone who hasn’t gotten the most out of Evernote—particularly its tagging features. I’m surprised that Evernote doesn’t make more of this. It seems to be buried deep in their documentation, but to me, if I can remember all the parameters, it suddenly makes Evernote a much more powerful beast.
As Mark Stout points out, you can then save a complex search in Evernote and that becomes a filter of its own.
The easiest way to find something is just to type a keyword for it in the search box.
Indonesia
If you want to exclude a word from the results, prefix it with the minus sign:
-indonesia
If you’re looking for any of several words—in other words soeharto OR suharto—you can use the modifier any.
Note there has to be a space between the any: and the first search term. Any: must be after other parameters but before the search terms. All words after any: will be assumed to be part of the any: search:
any: soeharto suharto
Tags
You can also narrow down by tags (note there’s no space between colon and the tag word):
tag:indonesia
If you add tags together, you need to preface each with tag:
tag:interview tag:thailand
If a tag is more than one word, then you need to put it in quotes:
tag:"digital abundance"
If you want to exclude all notes with a certain tag you can:
-tag:china
You can also use wildcards with (or to exclude) tags (wildcards can only appear at the end of words, or alone):
tag:com*
Notebooks
You can specify which notebook or notebooks you want to search in (so you don’t have to click on a specific notebook before you search):
notebook:unifi
The notebook parameter must precede all other parameters.
If your notebook contains more than one word the words need to be within quotation marks: notebook:”media asia”
It doesn’t seem to be possible to use this modifier to search all notebooks (unless you add them all manually by name.)
Titles
You can limit your search to notes with a word in the title:
intitle:indonesia*
Date
You can limit your search by date. Use the terms:
- created – when the note was created
- updated – when the note was updated
on or after a specific date: created:20091113
on or after a specific time (in this case 9.15 am): created:20091113T091500
or today: created:day
or yesterday: created:-day
or the past 30 days: created:day-30
or this week: created:week
or this month: created:month
or this year: created:year
The minus sign makes all these before this date or period:
Or before a date: created:-20091113
or yesterday: created:day-1
etc
Resource
You can also find notes with or without images, audio or ink notes
notes with at least one image or gif: resource:image/gif
notes with no audio: -resource:audio/*
Sources
(but my mistakes)
13 comments so far
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With a flourish of irony I’ll clip this into Evernote and never be able to find it because I can’t remember the appropriate search queries.
Another one I’ve found useful to keep as a saved search is “-tag:*” — in other words, “show me stuff I’ve forgotten to tag.”
Funny how just a throw-away comment (…“-tag:*” — in other words, “show me stuff I’ve forgotten to tag.”) is the answer to something I’ve been trying to figure out for months… with no response from Evernote to 3 inquiries.
Thanks Tom!
Tom, thanks for the tip. A good one. I’ve been looking for a way to turn these and other shortcuts into a simple popup a la Gmail’s Shift+?, where one small pane would list all the useful terms on request.
I’ve tried Klips, Windows Gadgets, Adobe AIR apps, but so far nothing quite works.
Use intitle: all the time. Wish it could be a button. Jeremy, keep trying – a popup would be most useful. Excellent post. Thanks.
Jeremy, I use the free Post-It Notes app Stickies to attach notes to windows. Set note properties to On Top and Attach|Only if Visible. Not exactly a popup but it gets the job done.
http://www.zhornsoftware.co.uk/stickies/index.html
Dave, thanks, I’ll try that. The guys at Klip say it is possible to use that; I’ll post if I get it working.
[...] How to Search Evernote « ten mov.es A very good primer on Evernote Search techniques! (Via tenmov.es ) [...]
@Sam Carson: I spit milk out my nose with your comment. Thanks for that!
Thanks for the tip. I actually stumbled across this in the API documentation as well, but you gave some really good examples.
Quick question: can you tell me how to search all notebooks? I tried “notebook:*”, “notebook:all”, etc. but can’t seem to make it work for me.
Thanks again,
Dale
Dale, good question, and it doesn’t seem to be possible.
[...] How to Search Evernote – ten mov.es [...]
Anyone know how to search all but a specific notebook? I have an “all notebooks” category, but I also have a notebook of “completed” items, and I don’t want those showing up when I do a search of active projects.