I have discovered what may be a bug in the search functionality of devonthink. It appears that devonthink does not include links in its search results. Suppose I create a file named orange.rtf, and in it write the word blue and create a link to the new file blue. If I now search the term blue, only the file blue will appear in the results, and it will not include orange.rtf which also contains the word blue. This is repeatable with any single word as well as multiple words that are converted to links.
I am using Devonthink 1.9.10
Can anyone else confirm this problem? I hope this helps you improve your great program =)
Thanks!
It’s not a bug in DEVONthink. Rather, Apple’s rich text doesn’t treat hyperlinks as text.
What that means is that hyperlink strings don’t get indexed as content in the database’s Concordance.
Try this experiment. Create a new rich text document and enter a few words. Save the document.
Do a Content (only) search for one of those words. Use Tools > Search, where the Content only option is readily available. The document will show up in the search results.
Now select all of the text, Control-click and use the Link To contextual menu option to link the text to any document in your database. The text string has been converted to a link. Save the document.
Repeat the search for that same word. This time, the document will not show up in the search results.
Now click in the document and choose Format > Make Plain Text. Save the document.
Repeat the search for that same word. This time, the document will show up in the search results.
Bottom line: Remember this. If a particular term or phase will be an important item for searching, but is in a link, select and copy the string to the clipboard and paste it into the Comment field in the document’s Info panel. As the content of the Comment field is plain text, that string will be searchable (not in a Content-only search, but in an All search).
This known issue will be fixed by v2.