Search for Docs without a specific word in them

DEVONthink Tips
1

What am I doing wrong here:
Search window predicate is
NOT “confidential”

results include hundreds of docs that do contain “confidential”
see attached predicate and Concordance window of one sample doc found clearly showing “confidential”

gotta be something simple I’m missing I guess

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2

What do you have set for options under the magnifying glass?

3

using a Search Window- but have ‘All’ for search set

4

If you’re looking to restrict searching to contents, don’t use “All”. Use “Contents”.

5

I’m not looking to restrict searching to contents; I’m trying to search for all docs that do NOT have the word “confidential” in their content/meta data/name;

How do I do that using the predicate NOT?

thanks for help!

6

my above attached result- shows that using:
NOT “confidential”
as a search predicate doesn’t work… Docs with ‘confidential’ are returned by the search–
what am I missing here?

Do I have to predicate the search with something in front of ‘NOT’ ? that stipulates all docs ?
If so, what term would specify all of them, then except those that contain ‘confidential’?

7

Looks to me like it might be a bug in the search function. I’ve tested this scenario myself and I get the same results that you do. Searching on content-only works, but searching for ALL includes documents in the search results that were filtered out when searching on content, even though the search term is not contained in the metadata, name, etc.

Predicating the search with something in front of NOT had no effect here.

8

yeah- thanks Greg;
You right seems to be a bug- If I search only on content it seems to work fine;

thanks for that confirmation - I’ll have to limit search to Content only until bug is fixed-
Hopefully this exchange gets it added to bug list for next rev–

thanks again