Text searches produce results that are listed in random ways. With Evernote the most recent notes where always at the top. Usually, I want to edit something I modified today. But things that are years old pop up first in the search results list. This makes finding things hard. What can be done about this?
In the View menu there is an option “Sort notes by” where you can choose to sort the list by updated date, created date, or title.
However I see that search results don’t seem to obey this setting.
Not sure if it’s a bug.
This menu is for sorting of notes, not for sorting the search result.
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I would also find having search results sorted in descending date order very useful.
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I agree. It is not clear how the search results are ordered. When there are many search results, then working through them is easier if the user can order them in some way. I have found the note I am looking looking for is usually one I modified most recently. Notes for the current project are updated again and again and therefore have the most recent modify dates. Having used Evernote, I notice (only afterwards as it turns out) that Evernote allows this and it is very helpful. Joplin is my preferred software now but it still has some sharp edges that need work.
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Just for info the FAQ regarding searching states,
Notes are sorted by "relevance". Currently it means the notes that contain the requested terms the most times are on top. For queries with multiple terms, it also matters how close to each other the terms are. This is a bit experimental so if you notice a search query that returns unexpected results, please report it in the forum, providing as many details as possible to replicate the issue.
It does not solve your particular issue but it does explain what Joplin is doing.
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Thanks
Me too, I found this option very useful! When searching always I have random sort order and don't like this situation. Would be nice that the search result to be sorted descending in the order of last edited notes.
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I would love a way to sort searches based on the same options offered for notes and notebooks, in addition to the current "relevance" magic. I was hoping to use tags as a way to generate "views" into my notebooks and subnotebooks -- for example, "notebook:work tag:urgent" to aggregate urgent tasks across all subnotebooks within "work". However, my note naming convention for urgency relies on sorting by Title and Reverse sort order. Works great in individual notebooks, but since I cannot apply a similar sort to the search query, tags cannot provide the aggregate view required by this setup.
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Was this ever added? - A way to sort search results by date order? I find the current relevance sorting order to be of very little use.
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Is there any work on the topic ? Indeed sorting the results by note name, soze, creation date etc.. would be really useful.
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At the moment I work on a PR to select BM25, name, creation or update date for the sorting order
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Looking at the Github issue it appears that the main dev declined to add this? That is truly unfortunate if that is the case. Joplin is perfect for me, but the search algorithm is not useful for those of use who have many years of notes that we need to search through. A simple search can return hundreds of results, some of them from many years ago (intermingles with more recent results), when all I want to do is to be able to sort (a global search across notebooks) from newest to oldest - that's all, something that nearly any application worth its salt allows for.
I will continue to use Joplin for the 99% of what it does great, and I will continue to support the effort through Patreon, but it is disappointing that something so straightforward as this is being IMO unfairly discounted.
Thank you for working on this @JackGruber
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Does he give a reason why this PR was declined? Maybe it has nothing to do with the ability of sorting a search at all?
Like always, this function should not be standard but selectiv in the options. So everyone can get what he wants.
And I defenitly chose it. 
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We should probably invite @laurent into the discussion but here was his response from the ticket:
I wish this had been discussed on the forum first so as not to spend too much time on the implementation. I'm not very keen to add this to be honest because I don't think it's the right solution to whatever problem there is.
When I look at the linked threads, it seems people usually want to sort by date, but Naveen added this at some point - more recent notes have a higher weight. So maybe it's a matter of tweaking the algorithm further and give more importance to the note date.
Another advantage of improving the search engine itself is that it will benefit the mobile app, CLI, API and plugins too.
My opinion is - although the algorithm is great, I believe for most queries of a collection of notes (which I authored) involve trying to find something that was written during a specific time - either very recently (these should be at the top) or some time in the past and if the results are in chronological order, one could page down through the results to find the appropriate timeframe. At least that is how I do most of my searches, perhaps most people don't work that way?
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I agree that sorting search result is rather critical.
I also handle quite a large number of notes.
The best option I found so far is rather cumbersome and the lack of date sorting of the search result does not help.
The way I do it is to use tag/labels per year.
So current notes are labelled 2023 so I can easily "focus" on one year (I have notes dating back in 1994...) and exclude the rest. I also rename my notes (I would love NOT having to do that) so the title is: 2023-04 - Whatever topic.
The reason I do that instead of using the created/updated properties are:
- it is much faster this way
- updated is .. well when I updated the note and does not have much meaning
- created also not always represent the interesting date/year. I may scan a document from 2021 in 2023.
Plugins like Embed Search nicely add an option to do a search like:
tag:foo tag:bar -tag:nope
sort:desc
This is already super useful.
I also recently created a new thread: Plugin/Feature: Link to search That could help as well.
Sorting search result is one thing Evernote did decently and that should be gold standard IMHO.
The note list supports basic sorting options and all options can be set to reverse:
- created
- updated
- title
This is a already pretty good and the seach results should have the same capabilities.
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Most of the time I sort my search results by date of change, but I want to be able to switch and not have an algorithm tell me what it thinks is right. Therefore I had created the PR, but it was not accepted.
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Hello JackGruber, the option you are describing, to sort search results (when searching across notes) by updated date, is exactly what I need. I am very unhappy with Joplin's "relevance" sort. I simply want to sort by updated date. How can I upvote your recommended PR?
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As far as I know, the decision to accept @JackGruber 's submission is up to the main developer @laurent who I believe feels the algorithmic search works well. With respect, I have also made my feelings on this clear that it would be great to have the option to sort results by last update.
I have an example from just yesterday - I am a product manager and one of my duties is the creation of new product SKUs. I've been doing this for 25 years and have about 12,000 notes, so you can imagine a search for "SKU" (to find some that I created a couple of months ago) will return hundreds of results. When I did this yesterday, of course the list of results is quite long and started with a note I created in 2015! I could find no reason why the algorithm would start with that result, and in fact, the latest note containing "SKU" was not on the first or second page of results. So, I had to refine the search by a folder that is only from this year - I know, not that big of a deal, but it would be nice for me to just enter my search term into the search box, with no other terms or constraints, and simply see the result I was after, from a couple of months ago, at, or near the top.
I do these kinds of searches a few times a day, so needing to enter additional terms and criteria can be frustrating.
I hope that the decision to not allow JackGruber's excellent solution will be reconsidered.
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