User's guide
Search
One search covers every day you have written on and everything inside your notes. Because searching is something you do from wherever you are standing, it is in the corner of every screen rather than on the menu.
Where it isSearch is in the corner, with the other controls that cover the whole app
The magnifier is at the top right, beside the chat bubble and the gear. The corner holds those three on a wide browser window, on a browser narrowed to phone width, and in the installed phone app, on every screen with a bottom bar. Search is one tap from wherever you are standing.
It opens over whatever you were looking at and closes back to it. Close beside the field, or the Escape key in a browser, puts you back where you were with the page underneath untouched.
What to typeThe words you remember, in any order
Type the words you remember, then press the magnifier beside the field or Return in a browser, or the keyboard's search key on the phone. Every word has to appear somewhere in the thing that comes back, and they do not have to be next to each other or in the order you typed them, so steak dinner finds an entry that says the steak at dinner. A single letter standing on its own is ignored, since one letter matches nearly everything you have written.
Quotation marks hold words together. "steak dinner" with the quotes finds only the entries and notes with those two words in that order. That is the whole of it: there is nothing else to remember, no operators and no fields to name.
Reading the resultsThe best answer leads, and each row shows what matched
Results come back best first rather than newest first. What leads is whatever holds all your words, in what you typed rather than in what a recording transcribed, and as whole words rather than buried inside longer ones. Between two that answer equally well the more recent one comes first.
A count sits above the rows, over both kinds together. When a search finds both, they come back in two named groups, Documents first and Entries under them.
Each row shows the stretch of text your words were found in, with at either end when it was cut out of something longer. That matters most for a recording. Its words are down in the transcript, so the entry's own first line can be a summary containing none of what you searched for. A row with no match to show falls back to the entry's own words.
An entry row also shows the day it came from and, when it has one, the life area it belongs to. A document row shows its title and the day it is filed under. Opening an entry takes you to the Journal on the day it was written; opening a document opens the document. A long-form entry is a pointer to a document, so it opens the document too, and when both matched the same words the document is the only row you get.
What it coversEverything you wrote, and nothing the app wrote about you
Search reads what you typed and what a recording transcribed, across every day on record, and it reads the text inside your notes rather than their titles alone. It reads your tasks too, by their description and by the note on one, finished ones included. A note you archived is not in it.
Rows filed under Signal or System are left out, the same way the Journal leaves them out.
If one half of a search fails, a line under the field says which half, and the rows you did get are still shown. Search never reports an outage as nothing found.