Feedback on searching notes

[morisy]

A user provided some very detailed suggestions on note searchability and tagging that are worth keeping in mind at the point we get to making notes searchable down the road. They said they previously used software called TagNotate, which is now deprecated.

Thanks for your prompt response. There are two things that would be awesome to have: the ability to do a key word search through just my notes and the ability to categorize my notes. I’d like to be able to label them in the some way, like with a hashtag or a color, and then be able to pull up all my notes in one place for everything with that label, across documents in a project folder.

If it helps, maybe think about like how we tracked things in the paper days. I might put a red sticky flag to mark everything that was relevant to prosecutorial misconduct and a blue sticky flag to mark everything that was police brutality. Then I’d be able to see on all my stacks of different documents everywhere there’s something important for those categories. That way after I’ve done so much work to read and fish out the key text, I could easily go back and reference throughout all my research where prosecutorial misconduct is found.

So let’s say I created a project on a wrongful conviction, and I uploaded 10 documents to that folder. As I’m reading each document, I then apply a label to each of my private notes. Then I could later click on that label in some way and be taken to a page that has all the notes from all 10 documents, along with the associated text, with that label. It could be as simple as if I had screenshotted all the blue boxes from each note and pasted them into a word doc. Each note would have the title of the document and the page for reference.

Even if this was a static page, it would be enormously helpful. Bonus points if there was a way to click on the note and be taken to that actual document where that note is. Would also be great to be able to search within a label. Sometimes I read thousands of pages of documents, so there might be hundreds of notes for a certain label. So if I could search for, say, a name in just my notes with that label, I could be so much more efficient. And when I say search my notes, I mean search the text that is highlighted within my notes. If that’s too crazy a feat, even just being able to search what I’ve written in my notes would be helpful.

[mitchelljkotler]

This is good feedback - tagging notes should be a straight forward addition, and searching only your own notes would simplify the complex permission handling which is the root of the challenge of searching notes (you need to be able to tell both the permission on the note itself and the document it is on to determine if someone has permission for a note)