Household · Explanation

How search works#

Where the text comes from#

Inkhold reads text; it doesn’t recognise handwriting itself. Your Supernote recognises the handwriting in your notebooks and saves that text inside each file. Inkhold reads it, as it reads the text of PDFs and text files.

So a notebook the tablet never recognised can’t be searched, and handwriting on a PDF can’t either: the tablet only recognises handwriting in notebooks. The line under your results says how many pages with writing are searchable, and Which notes lists the ones that aren’t, so a missing result never passes for “not there”.

Inkhold doesn’t run its own recognition on purpose: it would cost the server far more than everything else it does, and a Raspberry Pi has to be enough.

Where the search runs#

In your browser. The server keeps a compact index of the words in each file; the browser fetches the parts it lacks, keeps them, and answers every search itself. After the first search, searching costs the server nothing, and the second search is as fast as your device.

What a search matches#

A result holds every word you type, in its name or in its text: notebook and folder names, recognised handwriting, PDF and text file contents, and to-dos. Results come best first, by how much of a document matched, with notebooks weighed above other files. With no exact match, it looks for close spellings and says so.