Tools for Thought but not for Search?

Wouldn't you expect to find a recipe in your knowledge tool if you search for two of the ingredients? You won't find it, unfortunately.

You walk hungry in your kitchen one late evening, open your fridge, and look for something eatable. There isn’t much in there, but you have a few ingredients, especially parmesan and spaghetti. You are using this incredible, super-duper knowledge management tool where you store all your recipes. Indeed you will quickly find something tasty there if you enter “parmesan” and “spaghetti”. Not rocket science, is it?

Well, unfortunately, that depends on exactly which tool you are using.

Let’s look at Craft. Craft needs both words to be inside a block, otherwise, we won’t get a result and stay hungry.

Craft won’t find the recipe

Next Logseq. Same here, we won’t get a result.

Logseq won’t find the recipe

But fear not, Roam Research will find it for sure, or won’t it? It won’t.

Roam Research won’t find the recipe

What about Bear? Well, that cuddly Bear can do it with ease and highlights all search terms. This is how I imagined it!

Bear finds the recipe and highlights the terms

I think this is an essential task for all that block-based Tools for Thought: not only search in single blocks!

It's okay to rank blocks higher in the hit list than pages where the search terms are spread over several blocks. But not finding pages at all that have all the search terms is simply incorrect and unexpected for the user - and will leave many hungry 🤤

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