Notes search broken?

[vaalbara]

The title says it all: I had transferred my Notes from my previous Mojave installation a couple of months ago to Ventura. The search function can't even match the title of a note. It's not fully broken, some keywords seem to work properly.

Any clues?
(I'm having problems with Spotlight from time to time, but today is one of those days it seems to be working properly)

 

[Jared G.K.]

I had this problem some time ago last year, and spent hours/days/weeks on the phone with Apple support to prove it. First they didn't believe it. Several weeks and many support people/managers later they admitted that Notes search was flawed.

They promised to fix it but of course didn't give any timelines.

Weeks later, I felt that it improved. But up until today I don't fully trust it and still believe certain strings/substrings won't be found. The issue is, that I can't really reproduce it to start a new case with support. It definitely works better now, but like I said, I have a gut feeling it's still not at a 100% hit rate.

For me this is a source for uncertainty which no notes app should create. Therefore I still think of migrating over to Evernote - but for obvious reasons, Apple does not make it easy to do that. There is no way to bulk export Apple notes, all you can do is export note by note into PDF format, which a) is incredibly cumbersome if you have, like me, more than 1000 notes and b) doesn't transfer attachments properly.

So as per now, I'll continue with Apple Notes and an undefined concern of potentially not finding the note that I'm looking for. Until I have a better idea of what to do.

If I was starting new with a notes app, I would avoid Apple Notes in it's current state, and rather pay for an alternative like eg Evernote. Searching and finding notes at a 100% hit rate is THE core function of any notes app.

 

[Jared G.K.]

The title says it all: I had transferred my Notes from my previous Mojave installation a couple of months ago to Ventura. The search function can't even match the title of a note. It's not fully broken, some keywords seem to work properly.

Any clues?
(I'm having problems with Spotlight from time to time, but today is one of those days it seems to be working properly)

P.S. if your problem is not the one I'm facing, try to log off from iCloud on all your devices, reboot them and log in again. This may rebuild the index for your notes.

 

[gilby101]

There is no way to bulk export Apple notes

If you want to you can use an app like:

• Exporter (from the App Store) which exports everything to markdown or html

or

• Use AppleScript (search the web for what others have done first).

I used to have app (just AppleScript with a wrapper) which output to PDF, but it was never reliable.

A few years ago, I mostly gave up on Notes. Mostly because all notes hidden in a database and so no search from Finder, etc. I used Exporter to convert to markdown and now use Typora (there are other markdown editors) to create and edit. The notes are then files and so findable with Finder search. Bonus is no lock-in to any one product.

I now only use Notes for things like shopping lists at the hardware store or other ephemeral notes.

 

[Jared G.K.]

I should have said 'there is no standard option to bulk export Apple notes'.
I tried these exporters and scripts that can be found on the web and they are all not reliable and/or lots of manual post-processing is needed to make the exported notes function properly in another notes app. This is almost not doable if you have several hundred notes or more.
But if I remember correctly there is this guy who made a notes exporter app on Github who is still around and tells that he is constantly working on improving the app, so there is hope.