I’ve recently been moving all of my notes into Google Keep, which I appreciate for its simplicity (Evernote, take note – pun very much intended).
One of its shortcomings though is that you can’t seem to be able to search on multiple labels. For example, I use my labels contextually, so I might tag people that a note applies to, e.g. Martina, Ellie or Jack, but I may also label a note with what the label is about, e.g. gifts (for reminders about things that someone may appreciate as a gift), or food (for noting someone’s favourite restaurants, recipes, or how they like their coffee made). So when my wife’s birthday is coming up, I want to be able to search for all notes tagged with Martina and gifts. To my knowledge, there is not currently a way to do this within the Google Keep interface.
However, after using the web app and tinkering with the search URLs, I found what appears to be a manual working solution. When you use the interface to find notes in a given label, the URL looks like this:
https://keep.google.com/u/0/#search/tags%253Dcars
While there’s not a way to do this using the interface, you can simply add additional labels to the URL using a comma, which will search for additional labels using an AND operator.
So if I just want to pull up notes tagged with cars and how-to (to pull up notes that have processes for how to do things with my car, and ignore anything else to do with my cars) I can use the URL
https://keep.google.com/u/0/#search/tags%253Dcars,how-to
and it only pulls those notes up:
It’s a bit clunky, but it does the trick. Hopefully, Google will make this a core feature soon because I’m coming to rely quite heavily on Google Keep now (if you’re frustrated with your current note-taking software, give it a try).
thanks
“Hopefully, Google will make this a core feature soon” , yes, let’s hope so!
Thank you for sharing this working around. I am also using Google Keep quite a bit and the multi-tag search function has quickly become a necessity.
Thanks very much for the tip – excellent.
I also use the Keep web interface to get the URL for a specific note so that I can insert the link into another note for cross-linking notes.
Thanks for this! I simply Bookmark the Keep results, change the name to my custom lookup and that works like a charm!
There seems to be a limit of 2 labels that can be searched for.
If you use 254 instead of 253 it looks like you can search 3 or more tags as well.
Thanks for the pointers here. I was hoping to find that somebody’d found how this works through labels, but I think we are indeed stuck with using search for now.
However, it does not need to be as complicated as you propose: maybe I’m late to the party, and so perhaps it was true at time of posting that this wasn’t possible through the interface, but it is now, (through desktop mode in a browser at least)…
the way to do this through the UI is to *simply search both tags*, separated by a space. For example “cars to-do” instead of “cars” + manually manipulating the URL. The result of the multi tag search in this example gives the URL result of https://keep.google.com/#search/text%253Dcars%252Cto-do
This solves the problem (which evidently has a different manual workaround itself) of the possible tag limit of your solution inherently, too. So, a search for “cars to-do free” will result in notes with those three labels (via the URL of https://keep.google.com/#search/text%253Dcars%252Cto-do%252Cfree); presumably, this can continue until the URL is too long for your browser, offering much more opportunity to search label combos than a manual URL hack.