Search and discover

Dovetail uses semantic search to display results based on the intent and context of your search query. This allows you to find what you're looking for without prior knowledge of note titles, highlight content, or tag names.

Start a quick search

To start a quick search, click on the search bar or press Cmd/Ctrl K on your keyboard and enter your query. Quick search will display projects, folders, insights, and notes with matching titles wherever they are in your workspace.

Start a deep search

After entering your query in the search bar, click on Explore and summarize all results to open deep search.

Deep search will retrieve and rank results semantically based on meaning and keywords. This means results don’t have to match keywords exactly, nor do they have to match on meaning necessarily. Results that do both will be considered more relevant in search. You can add filters, adjust the sorting, and utilize exact matching to refine your search results in deep search.

Generate a magic summary of your search results. This summary will be automatically created using the top 50 highlights in your results. At this time, it will not surface content from notes, insights, or tags.

When your search results contain highlights, a summary will be automatically generated, but you can also manually generate a summary by clicking Summarize in the top right.

After entering your search, you may want to refine the search results further. Dovetail offers multiple ways to do this.

Return exact matches

Add quotation marks to your search terms to return exact results for that phrase. For example "keyword" to search for an exact term.

Without quotes, searches may also include results for similar terms (for instance, issues containing "test" may show up in a search for "testing").

Filter search results

Dovetail’s search supports filtering results by the following objects.

• Title (text) – The plain title of the project, note, tag, or insight.

• Content (text) – The content of the note, tag, insight, or highlight.

• Note (multi select) – A specific note.

• Tag (multi select) – A specific tag.

• Project (multi select) – A specific project.

• Folder (multi select) – A specific folder.

• Note board (multi select) – A specific note board.

• Note group (multi select) – A specific note group.

• Tag board (multi select) – A specific tag board.

• Tag group (multi select) – A specific tag group.

• Created (date) – When the object was created.

• Updated (date) – When the object was last updated.

Please note that not every filter listed will be available when looking at specific objects in search. For example, you won’t be able to filter by 'published’ when looking at notes only as you are unable to publish notes.

Sort your results

By default, results are sorted by Relevance, but this can be changed to their Created or Updated date or alphabetically by Name by adjusting the sorting filter at the left of the filter bar.