Search your notes

Last updated August 21, 2026

Notate searches the full text of your notes instantly, so you can find a note by anything it contains, not just its title.

Search is not case-sensitive anywhere. In the web app, where searching runs on Notate’s servers, it also matches related word forms, so searching for run finds running. The desktop and mobile apps search a local index that matches your words as written, which is a little stricter. Either way, searching for the words you remember will find the note.

Full-text search

Open search and start typing. Results update as you go, with a snippet showing where your terms matched. On desktop and mobile the search index is local, so results come back immediately, even offline.

The result count is followed by the total number of times your terms appear across all of them, so a query that hits one note fifty times reads differently from one that hits fifty notes once. Each result shows its own count too, along with the first few matches and the line each one is on. Click a match to open the note at that exact spot, with the rest of the matches highlighted and the find bar ready to step through them. Where a note has more matches than fit, a control below them reveals the rest.

When a result matches on its title or one of its tags rather than in the body, the matching text is highlighted where it appears, so you can see why the note is in the list.

A result found by meaning rather than by keyword may not contain your search terms literally, so it shows a snippet instead of a match count. When a search returns both kinds, the list is split into Keyword results and Semantic results, so it is clear which results contain what you typed and which are suggestions.

If a note has frontmatter and you have properties set to show as a panel, matches inside that block are left out of the results, the same way they are left out of find within a note.

Narrowing a search

You can add operators to a query to narrow it. They combine with each other and with your search words, and a leading - excludes instead of includes.

Dates are written as YYYY-MM-DD, and a plain date means that whole day. Use > for after and < for before, as in updated:<2026-03-01.

Put quotes around a value containing spaces, like tag:"deep work", and around a phrase you want matched exactly, like "quarterly review".

Anything Notate does not recognise stays part of your search text, so a note containing TODO: is still findable by typing it.

That leniency has a catch worth knowing about: a mistyped operator is not an error, it just becomes ordinary search text, and a search for text no note contains returns nothing. So an empty result can mean “nothing matched” or “that operator was not understood”, and the two look identical. The usual causes:

• A date in another format. Only YYYY-MM-DD is read as a date. updated:>08-01-2026 is not, because 08-01-2026 is the 1st of August in the United States and the 8th of January nearly everywhere else, and a confidently wrong set of results is worse than an obviously empty one.
• A spelling Notate does not carry. is:favorite works; is:favourite does not.
• A tag or folder that does not exist. tag: and folder: match a whole name, so a typo matches nothing.

If a query surprises you by returning nothing, take the operators off one at a time and see which one was doing it.

The Aa and ab toggles from find and replace are specific to searching within a note and have no equivalent here. Find works on the text of the note in front of you, so it can be exact about case and word boundaries; search works through an index built for speed across thousands of notes, which is what makes results appear as fast as you type.

Which workspaces are searched

Search covers the workspace you are in, matching the folder tree and the note list beside it. The scope control below the search box changes that:

• This workspace follows whichever workspace you are in, so switching workspace moves the search with it.
• All workspaces searches everything you have.
• Picking a workspace by name pins the search to it, so it stays there even when you move to a different workspace. Handy when you are working in one place but keep needing to look something up in another.

Notes that are not filed in any folder are only reachable from All workspaces, since there is no folder to tell Notate which workspace they belong to.

On mobile

Mobile has a Search tab of its own, next to Notes. It searches the workspace you are in, the same as elsewhere, and takes the same operators.

Two differences from the web and desktop apps:

• Results show each note’s match count, but not the individual matches, because there is no find bar on mobile for a line number to open into. Tap a result to open the note; the back arrow returns you to your results.
• has:transcript finds nothing on mobile. Transcripts are not stored on the device, so there is nothing there to match. It still works in the web and desktop apps.

The box at the top of the Notes tab is a filter, not a search: it narrows the list in front of you. The Search tab is the one that looks across the whole workspace.

Searching inside one note

To search the note you have open rather than across notes, use find and replace.

Filter in place

Above the folder tree and the note list sit two boxes labelled Filter folders and Filter notes. On mobile the same box sits at the top of the Notes tab.

They are called filters rather than searches on purpose, and the difference is worth knowing:

• A filter hides rows from the list already in front of you. It only ever narrows what you can see, and clearing it puts everything back.
• Search goes and looks through every note in the workspace, including ones not currently on screen, and reads their full text rather than just their titles.

So if you are narrowing down a big folder you are already looking at, filter. If you are trying to find something you cannot see, search.

Jumping straight to a note

If you know the note’s title, the quick switcher opens it in a couple of keystrokes without going through search at all.

Searching by meaning

On the AI plan, or on Sync with your own provider key, semantic search finds notes by meaning as well as by keyword.