Searching

Searching

Like all popular commercial software packages, it has its detractors as well as supporters. Critics emphasize that there are dedicated email clients that are simpler, more intuitive and have a lower purchase price. Proponents emphasize that richer capabilities and advanced programmability are available, that purchase price is a small fraction of total cost of ownership. There remain subtle irregularities in user interface behaviour and algorithms that continue to earn the client some disdain from many day-to-day users. Common criticisms of the product includes:

The searching in Notes is an "and search", rather than the more common "or search". For example, searching for ‘delete folder’ in Notes contains will not return information on how to delete a folder, but "delete and folder" will. In some organisations, users do not have the knowledge or permissions to fully text index databases for searching. It can be enabled by the administrators, however.
Notes's built-in full text search engine will only find email in the currently selected folder or view; if you click search while you're in your Inbox, then that's the only place that the search will look. To the user, it can appear that Notes has lost the email, in this case, when in fact, the user is simply "not looking in the correct place". (The correct place to initiate search is the Notes mailbox's All Documents view, if you want to search the entire mailbox.) A further cause of this complaint is confusion between the "Starts with" search and full text search features offered in the Notes UI, the former of which will only search on data that is visible in the currently sorted column of the visible folder. NB: Notes administrators sometimes disable the full text indexing in order to conserve server CPU time or (more often) disk space. The product's defenders point out that Notes does, at least, have a built-in full text search, unlike rival, Microsoft Outlook.

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