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by PaulHoule 1478 days ago
(1) Sometimes good notetaking apps get ruined over time. I was a fan of Microsoft's OneNote for a while until they stopped saving notes in a well-documented XML format and kept all the data in the cloud. Microsoft also worked hard to kill OneNote by shoving it up every orifice of the Windows 8 user: print something? the default it is to save the printout to one note? Look for an application on the taskbar? Microsoft shoved three icons for OneNote onto the taskbar?

Microsoft never seems to learn that this behavior is perceived as harassment and that if they push a product too hard, even a great product, people are going to be angry that OneNote is opening when they wanted to print something to the printer, all they are going to think is OneNote is crap and they want nothing to do with it.

(2) Personalized full-text search is a tough problem, since Google came out nobody has been satisfied with the results they get from other full-text search products.

1 comments

I can really agree on the first point but know too little about the second one. It is indeed a problem but i think in most cases keywords or tags should be enough to implement. Im not sure but even full text search should not take that long for plaintext/md notes.
It's not a problem in terms of speed or CPU consumption, it's a problem in terms of relevance. It's when the relevant document you are looking for is result #34 or when the relevant document doesn't appear at all.

People will say "just use Lucene, bro" but often Lucene's search ranking is awful. (I used to laugh at "just use Solr, bro" because Solr's search scales about as well as Bitcoin when you add more shards.)

As for tags that depends on people putting accurate tags on. People hate to hear it, but tags need to have an ontology behind them to be really effective. For instance there is an anime imageboard that has tags like "purple hair", "green eyes" and these are close to useless for an image that has two people in it.

fair point i agree with that thanks for explaining