How to search notes by the title?

Is there a way to search notes by the title?

If not, could we have a new special qualifier to filter the result?

Hi Zhuolun,

Thank you for the question.
I’m afraid that title: qualifier is not supported at the moment.
Could you tell me your usecase so that I can understand precisely what you are trying to do.

Most of the time I use Inkdrop to take notes when reading technical books or papers.

When I try to locate a note it’s not easy to do that by filtering keywords since they are shared between a lot of notes(sometimes even the title of the note is a very common keyword in other notes). And what I actually want is always not the first one in the result.

E.g, I try to locate “Git Man Notes”. It ranks 4th instead of the first even though I type the exact title of that note.

I hope I can filter them by the title first.

Thx. :smile:

Happy to know how you use Inkdrop!

Looks like you are searching in local scope where it always sorts by the current list order (updated date, created date, etc.).
If you pressed cmd-shift-f again while the focus is at search bar, it changes search scope to global where the app sorts by rank based on bm25 algorithm.
Please read the doc about local and global scopes:

I’d like to know if global scope search ranks it better.

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Thank u. It indeed works for me.

Thanks for letting me know.
Seems like local scope should also sort notes by rank!

+1 on the idea of a title: modifier for the searching :smiley:

Well, let’s reopen the issue.

I think the problem is that the current ranking algorithm deals with note title and body equally.
I found that SQLite3’s bm25 algorithm can have weight for each column:

https://www.sqlite.org/fts5.html#the_bm25_function

So, the search results can be improved by having bigger weight for title column.
I’ll check if it’s possible on the mobile app as well.

confirmed that it works great on the desktop version.

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It is landed in v5.0.0 :tada:
Thanks again for your feedback!

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title: and body: qualifiers have been supported in v5.2.0-beta.1.
You can try them by installing the beta version!

Released in v5.2.0🎉

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