Title says it all: add search function & indexing within and inside all notes.
not only secure notes, but also notes added to each and every field inside all items in bitwarden.
not required, but at least add an option for each user to have this feature. I loovvveee this feature from lastpass.
TY
Looks like search is working but not with partial strings contained within a specific word, for example:
Let’s say I have a note that contains the following:
Account: QT897XX9
Searching for “QT” or “account” brings up the note correctly but searching for “T897” brings up no result, this is clearly wrong and a user expects to also find contents by partial keywords.
I’ve tagged this one for evaluation - definitely would be handy to return substring matches!
um, not sure about this. it seems to be working differently in different places.
i primarily use logins and have very few notes items in my vault, but i do have some login items with text in the notes fields and custom fields added and filled.
i have a login called “router”. searching for “out” returns this as a result. great substring matches seem to work. inside the notes field of “router” i have written “teest”. searching for “tee” returns no results, but searching for “teest” hits this as a result. i have another login item that has a custom text field labeled “address” with content of “outdated”. searching for anything between “a” and “addres” does not return this login item as a result; only “address” will correctly return this as a result. same for searches with “outdated”; i get partial matches with “out” in “router”, but nothing short of “outdated” will return the login item with the “outdated” “address”.
i would really like to see robust search capabilities that are consistent across all fields and item types, so that i can get expected results consistently across all items with only partial inputs.
edit: just found out about the “advanced searches” (https://help.bitwarden.com/article/searching-vault/) and the behavior i see is expected given the implementation according to the help/knowledge-base article. and i think the op’s request is satisfied using advanced search. not as quick or convenient as might be wished, but that is often one of the trade-offs with robust function.
Hi,
I can search into secure notes in browser without problem using the browser search function but I can’t find a way to do so from the mobile app.
Maybe am I missing something ?
Thanks
PS : the global search function doesn’t find my secure notes string neither
Looks like this is still a bug in the current version of the Chrome extension (1.46.1). Specifically, the bug is that the search function will not find partial text matches within Secure Notes. You have to type in an entire word to get match(es) from Secure Notes. This same bug is also in version 1.20.1 of the Windows desktop app.
Yes, I really miss this functionality.
this is not true. you can get partial matches in secure notes or any field by using the advanced search. there is no intention for substring matches from notes to be included in search results if the basic search was used.
if you cannot get it working with the advanced search (">notes:{partial text search term}" and you will need to include wildcards depending on what portion of the string you are searching for) then that is a bug and should be reported as such.
Hi, I’ve just installed Android client.
Got here searching for an issue.
I would like to search inside Secure Notes too. In my case I get results when matching the Secure Note title, not inside.
How do you do an advanced search? I couldn’t find that feature in Android client.
There is no soft way of putting this. It’s just unacceptable that Secure Notes cannot be searched by string. I have no option but to abandon BitWarden because of this. It’s the ONLY reason.
This is ridiculous. I ditched LastPass for Bitwarden, but now I’m looking at other password managers to move again, because I can’t find anything within Bitwarden!!!
@Ameer Try serching with “*”. depending on if it is part of the word in front, at the back or both of your search term. E.g.: mysearchterm
Also you can take a look at https://bitwarden.com/help/article/searching-vault
@mrxx99 Thank you for the help. I can confirm that using an asterisk works for secure notes, but still does not search everything, including credit card numbers.
Like, if I use 2490 which are 4 digits out of my credit card number, it won’t find anything.
The exact indexed/searchable data is listed in the help article. For credit cards:
subtitle: Depending on Item Type; Login Username, Card Brand or last four digits, or Identity Name.So, you can only search for last 4 digits.
This might be for security reasons, similar to not indexing passwords.
OK, that makes total sense. Thanks a lot.
I found this thread after not being able to find my mortgage account on the Android app. When I search Notes using the Chrome extension, it only matches the entire word. It sure would be nice to match partial searches in Notes.
Doing the same search in Notes on Android yields 0 results even when searching the entire word. Yeah it does match both full and partial with the login entries, but not Notes.
Regardless, it’s not good design to have 2 different search policies on different platforms. Full indexed search including partial match is the way to go IMO. If people want to exclude secure notes, make an option for that.
So I’m back after some months, and I’ve been notified of people asking practically the same questions about the search functions.
Sorry I don’t mean to offend, but let me be frank: the main reason why people still kept asking is that, the search feature of bitwarden isn’t intuitive.
I was a LastPass user before, and their search works like magic. You type something, it shows up. It didn’t need any kind of code or prefix or suffix or any asterisks or anything. No, I’m not praising LastPass here; there’re reasons I left their service. But my point here is that, search functions especially for a password manager should be intuitive.
Perhaps a lot of people who’ve asked questions about Bitwarden’s search functions do have the same idea as me: I type something, it should show up. No matter if it’s uppercase or lowercase, it has space in between or none, it’s a title or a subtitle or a password or a note, a part or whole of a word or phrase—once I type something, it should search all. An option for search refinement is of course a welcome feature.
Sorry but I’d like to ask for the spotlight to be back on this issue.Thanks a lot everyone.
I can only agree with bebotette, the search function is far from intuitive and is not reliable at all, whereas it really should be 100% foolproof!
Since my switch from LastPass I have had several mysterious instances where things that I have stored in the notes section just cannot be found. Yesterday I urgently needed my NHS (Health) details and typing that into Bitwarden’s search bar revealed two other non-relevant items because the one I actually needed happened to have been joined to another word with a preceding slash, e.g. “ID/NHS”.
After reading this forum’s Feature Request, I realised I could use a wildcard asterisk which now finds my missing note, but on further testing just now, I wouldn’t have found it if I’d stored the info as ID/NHS: (with a following colon), only when I add an asterisk on either side of my search term does it then find it.
This is not a good situation and I’m not confident that there wouldn’t be other oddly typed permutations in my Notes entries that would always get picked up because I’m not using the right deep and mystical qualifying search criteria. From what I’ve also read here, it seems that searching Secure Notes are yet another issue!!! (not tested yet, but why do I even have to test it to be confident???).
I have read the suggested page on Advanced Search https://bitwarden.com/help/article/searching-vault/ but this is way above what anyone would normally expect to have to learn or do for a full search of everything. In fact I don’t understand that page at all, it doesn’t even specifically mention the asterisk search and instead goes into all sorts of complexities using the greater than symbol (>) and various qualifiers which I certainly do not intend to have to commit to my brain cells.
That particular help page doesn’t even make sense - the top bit goes on about filter or navigational menu options I can’t find/don’t see, and for Basic Search it says: For your convenience, basic search automatically includes leading and trailing wildcards. For example, searching for mail will return Vault items with the name gmail as well as email. - (however this didn’t seem to work for me in my NHS example above and just leads me to lose trust in Search not working at all reliably!).
Why on earth can we not just have a search function that works just like everywhere else in other programs that fully search everything as we request or type it?!? Surely “Advanced Search” is for when we need more control to really narrow things specifically down, however, Bitwarden currently seems to have its search priorities and function the wrong way around! It should be Simple/Obvious first, then Advanced (with a clear button to do so).
This limitation and a few other niggles about Bitwarden’s usability are making me question its real usefulness. Already I have lost a few generated passwords for web pages due to the way it fails to offer me a blatant or imperative save option (or fails to register it at all if the email/username is entered on another initial popup page/dialogue box). I’ve also got annoyed a few times when I’m in the middle of creating or editing a password/note and then click away for a moment to do or check on something else, only to find Bitwarden has lost/wiped/cancelled whatever I was doing, editing or creating. - These sorts of things just should not be able to happen!
It’s been a while, but I see that this function hasn’t been implemented, at least in the Firefox extension.
Any update?
No engineering updates just yet, but we haven’t forgotten about search usability.