When you run a search from the search pane located in the toolbar, does DEVONthink have an operator that can be used to exclude some of the search terms from the inspector’s (in document) search results?
To explain, consider the following query: 1Word AND (2Wor* OR 3Wor*). Here I’m looking for documents that contain the first word and the first part of either the second or third word.
While the first word is obviously essential to my search, let’s say that I don’t want to see its occurrences listed in the search inspector because it’s always repeated a ton in these particular documents, and it’s the latter two words that I’m most interested in (i.e., once I know that I’m looking at the subset of documents containing 1Word). In this scenario, when running my initial search from the search pane located in the toolbar, is there an operator that I can place in front of 1Word that would (1) honor the search term, but (2) exclude it from the search inspector’s results found in the document (i.e., so that it only shows me the occurrences of the later two search terms)?
If not, what do people do in these scenarios? Obviously, you can manually delete the first term from the inspector’s search entry, but this isn’t ideal (not only because its manual but also) because then you have to start thinking about all the usual Mac-related search limitations (like no wildcards, etc.).
I’m sure everyone can tell from the post, but I’m a DEVONthink newbie. Apologies if I’m not using the correct terminology in the description above.
@cgrunenberg Thanks for getting back to me. Sad to hear there’s no such operator in DEVONthink. Any chances the developers of DEVONthink 3 would consider adding one? It’s not only helpful for the scenario described above, but it should also decrease the amount of time that it takes for the inspector’s search pane to identify each occurrence (i.e., because it doesn’t have to search for those terms). Thanks!
@mog I’ve never used Amazon Textract, so I can’t say. There are some aspects of PDF Search that I really liked, but ultimately I felt like it wasn’t capable of performing some of the more sophisticated searches that I was hoping for. To be honest, I felt like the results that I got from Alfred and HoudahSpot - which rely strictly on Spotlight metadata - were actually better than PDF Search’s results. That’s why I started looking back into DEVONthink Pro.
Also, to clarify my previous post, the minus sign in PDF Search doesn’t exactly work as described. Admittedly, I was a little exhausted last night when writing! In PDF Search it basically omits pages in the results where the term appears (which is similar to most boolean searching, but a little different from most apps because its results are based on pages - and not the PDF overall). Between that and its +/plus operator, which only shows pages where the terms appear, you can essentially get the app to behave as described.