Keyword Search Examples

    Here are some examples of ways to put keyword searching to good use (i.e. using the "Search" form in "Keywords" mode).

    Sometimes a note's title will include a distinctive and unusual word. If you want to retrieve such a note, one quick way to do it is to do a keyword search and enter the first two or three letters of the distinctive word. That may be enough to allow keyword autocompletion to fill out the rest of the word, or, if not, to bring the distinctive word into view in the scrollable list of keywords (in which case you can tap on the keyword where it appears in that list.) Once the distinctive word is in the "Search for" list, do the search, and view the results of the search in the BrowseList form. Since the word is unusual, there will only be a few notes (or maybe just one note) in the search results, so it will be easy to spot the note you want and edit it.

    If the note's title uses fairly common words, another approach is to enter 2 or 3 of those words into the "Search for" list, and do the search. There may be many notes found as "hits", but there will probably be very few notes (or perhaps just one) that use all the words that were searched for in the title, and those notes will be listed at the top of the results list (due to the sorting of the search results) - so, once again, it will be easy to find the note you want!

    Regarding a note's title, a general suggestion is to use a straightforward title that describes what the information in the note is - without making assumptions about how the information will be used.

    Then, after the title (i.e. after the first line - terminated by a newline - in the keyword list), you can list additional searchable keywords. A good way to choose these keywords is to give a moment's thought to how the information in the note could be useful to you in the future (i.e. in what situations or scenarios would you want to refer to the note?). Then, for each of those situations, choose keywords that you would be very likely to search for, and add those to the keyword list.

    For example, suppose you had a note that keeps track of donations made to public television. The title might be "donations to PBS". Let's suppose that you received a Pink Floyd concert DVD as a thank-you gift. At some time in the future, you might feel like watching a music DVD - so you could tag this note with the keywords "music" and "DVD". Also, when April rolls around (in U.S.A.), you might be able to count part of the contribution as a tax deduction, so you could add the keywords "tax" and "deduction". And so on, for whatever situations you anticipate in which this note could be useful. In effect, the keyword search feature enables you to 'file' a note in several different ways simultaneously!

    When you actually do one of these searches, the search may return a number of hits that aren't actually relevant at that time, mixed in with the hits that are relevant... In this situation, the Browse form makes it easy to review the hits individually and move from one note to the next with a single tap.

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