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Search isn't finding all the notes that contain my search term

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Taylor Christensen

14 Sep, 2013 07:00 PM

I think I might know why it's doing this--it's searching html instead of what the user sees. So, if I've bolded only part of a word (which I do often to highlight the part of the word that's being used as part of a mnemonic), that note won't be included in the search results unless I only search for the unbolded or bolded part of the word.

For example, I searched "neonat" to pull up any notes that include the word neonatal or neonates. Then when I searched "eonat" it added a note to the results. The first letter of the word "neonate" was bolded in the new note it found.

I checked, and the Anki iPhone app also has this problem.

1. 1 Posted by itraveller on 14 Sep, 2013 08:00 PM

   

   This is not a mistake but a planned behavior in order to optimize the search process.
   Quote from the manual:
   

   Anki is only able to search within formatting in the sort field
   you’ve configured. For example, if you add "<b>exa</b>mple"
   to one of your fields, this will not be matched when searching
   for "example" unless that field is the sort field.
   

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2. 2 Posted by Taylor Christen... on 16 Sep, 2013 01:58 PM

   

   I missed seeing that in the manual, thank you. FWIW, I'd rather my searches take a little longer but actually pull up all the cards that contain my search term.

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3. 3 Posted by Soren Bjornstad on 16 Sep, 2013 08:39 PM

   

   It's not a small optimization -- the alternatives are having to cache a
   text-only version of every field (which Anki 1 was capable of doing, but
   used a large amount of extra disk space) or strip all HTML from every field
   on every possible card on every search.

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4. Soren Bjornstad closed this discussion on 05 Oct, 2013 03:50 PM.