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.