Feature request: Smart searches

UKenGB
UKenGB
Community Member
edited February 2019 in Lounge

Since I cannot see any way to achieve this, I'm assuming it is not currently possible, but I think it would be extremely useful if we could create smart searches, with multiple criteria and be able to save them. So basically exactly the same as iTunes Smart Playlists and Mail.app's Smart Mailboxes etc.

In particular, I use tags to organise logins, but a single tag is often not sufficiently closely defined, So e.g. I might need to be able to group Logins, with the 'forum' tag and the 'car' tag, so I could view all logins to car forums and not be cluttered up with software forums etc. The only way to currently achieve this is to create multiple tags, like 'Car forum' and 'Software forum', but then they are not close together when looking at the list of tags. So instead use 'forum-Car' and 'forum-Software', but this is still a kludge and doesn't work well for many reasons e.g. logins with either of those tags would not appear in the 'forum' or 'Car' tag groups - unless those tags were also added to each Login. However you try to do it, it's a mess.

The only wholly satisfactory method of grouping is to be able to apply multiple criteria to a search (with 'AND' and 'OR' options) and of course be able to save for re-use.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who'd find this really very useful.


1Password Version: 6.8.9
_Extension Version:
Not Provided
_OS Version: MacOS 10.14.3
_Sync Type: iCloud & Dropbox

Comments

  • landen
    landen
    Community Member
    edited February 2019

    Would nested tags work? They show up one level deeper in the sidebar.
    So: forum/car, forum/software

    Edit: I guess this is similar to your hyphen-based solution, and would still require you to add an additional tag to get all cars and software to show up in their respective tags. My mistake.

  • AGAlumB
    AGAlumB
    1Password Alumni

    We don't have a "smart searches" feature, but it's something we'd like to do in the future, if we can develop a good cross-platform-friendly way of doing it. "Smart Folders", etc. are macOS features, but we've got awesome customers using many other platforms now, and we don't want them to be left out. :)

  • pglezen
    pglezen
    Community Member

    I would also be a fan of smart searches, especially as they relate to tags. As an Evernote user, I frequently search notes with queries like

    tag:this tag:that
    

    This tells Evernote that I'm looking specifically for items I tagged with both this and that, not simply items that happen to have those strings somewhere inside the note.

    I appreciate that search is a big topic and highly non-trivial. We can already search on significant amount of text content. If additional search features were added to the 1Password feature plan incrementally, I think leveraging the tags would add a lot of power. It's really helpful for vaults larger than 40 or 50 entries.

    @UKenGB mentioned logical operators like AND and OR. Those would be nice, also; but probably a follow-on feature. In the absence of logical operators, I would opt for assuming AND, so that adding tag entries to the search box further restricts the matches rather than enlarging the match set like we expect for non-tag searches.

    I'm not a big fan of nested tags. It feels natural to start that way; and that's just what I did (with Evernote). But I've found that applying tags in a flat structure is most flexible. It allows us to simulate hierarchies dynamically through logical AND of tags rather than statically through a nesting scheme. If I have a vault for servers accessed by an integration team, these servers can be categorized by environment, by application, by API protocol, or by owning department/agency. A nested (i.e. hierarchical) scheme would compel me to choose one of these categories as the top level, and then another one below that, and so on. What seems reasonable at first will always be wrong later. Flat tags allow me to dynamically restrict on any category I choose.

  • AGAlumB
    AGAlumB
    1Password Alumni

    Though nested tags was a highly requested feature I agree with your comments, and I think we can all agree that having better ways to find the data we want is a good thing. The challenge is that it needs to be discoverable and intuitive, as we've got customers with a wide range of backgrounds using 1Password. Evernote long ago got away from me due to increasing complexity, and I am fairly technical. So I'll always advocate for adding features that anyway can use easily. If we can accomplish something like that in this area, everybody wins. :)

This discussion has been closed.