Searches need to be better

[Rodrigo]

Hey @stefan and @jason, I just wanted to follow up on the comment below since we’ve seen a lot of good back-end (and front-end) updates over the past few months. Have there been any developments regarding advanced search functionality? Or can we expect searching to remain largely the same because of the database design?

Thanks for your attention! (Aside: I know a similar comment was just posted elsewhere, so feel free to respond to either thread.)

@Rodrigo

Does the Paperpile team have any updates on their efforts to improve search functionality?

Specifically, I’m wondering about functionality enabling searching by specific fields (e.g., intitle:content analysis), handling exact phrases (e.g., “content analysis”), and excluding certain terms (e.g., -survey). As people have noted in this thread and others, the search functionality becomes less helpful when one’s library begins to grow, and especially when search terms have both general and domain-specific uses (necessitating precise filtering).

I understand that Paperpile’s database design makes it difficult to implement those features but I’m wondering if the “big update” (that will enable more powerful mobile apps, etc.) has made those changes more feasible and bumped them up on the roadmap.

(As an aside, full-text searching would be fantastic but I understand that’s a far more labor-intensive feature request extensively discussed elsewhere.)