# Does Everyone Know: K2 Searches Your Notes, & Notes Can Be Tags?



## Tillamook Bay (Mar 3, 2009)

Hi.

Is anyone else doing, or interested in doing tags on their K2?  I tagged all my books four days ago, and it works very nicely, since K2's search function is much faster than K1's, and both the addition of notes and searching is easier, too.

If anyone cares I'm willing to share what I've learned so far.

Also I'm interested to hear what others have experienced and what ideas they have for useful tags. 

lg


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## marianneg (Nov 4, 2008)

Yeah, I've started seeing this on the amazon boards.  Darn it, I wasn't going to get a K2, but tags.....


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## chiffchaff (Dec 19, 2008)

I'm interested in doing this.  Did you just create a note with the tag or tags you wanted to attach to each book?  I hadn't thought of that but can see how it would work - it'd have to be a coded tag that wouldn't show up in a normal text note, I suppose?


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## Tillamook Bay (Mar 3, 2009)

chiffchaff said:


> I'm interested in doing this. Did you just create a note with the tag or tags you wanted to attach to each book? I hadn't thought of that but can see how it would work - it'd have to be a coded tag that wouldn't show up in a normal text note, I suppose?


1. Yes. Open each book to the "beginning" and then create a note and put all the tags in that one note. Try to think of everything, because it's faster to create the initial note than to go back and edit it later Plus, each time you edit a note some reindexing will take place making one or more documents unsearchable.

2.Yes. I do this by prefixing the letter q. For example, my science fiction books are coded qscifi. (that idea stolen from someone on the Amazon forum ~ last August)

Besides genre tags you might want to also tag whether the book is "open" (I use 'qo') or as yet unopened (I use 'qu'), and maybe even completed ('qc', perhaps?).

Keep a list of your tags so you don't forget and use a different tag for the same thing, later.

Here's a pointer to the thread on the Amazon K2 discussion board:

http://www.amazon.com/Solution-categorizing-titles-the-K2/forum/Fx2EGRL42MHF15D/TxDQHZW4MJC3J/1/ref=cm_cd_et_up_redir?_encoding=UTF8&asin=B00154JDAI&newContentNum=11&cdSort=oldest&newContentID=MxR8YJWAVFONLE#Mx32L3BKSECPZUQ

lg


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## chiffchaff (Dec 19, 2008)

just tried this with about a dozen books and personal docs- works great, thanks!  

I borrowed the idea of using q as a prefix since it's easy to remember, then I used the same bookshelf names I have on GoodReads.com, i.e. genres plus read, to-read and currently-reading (shortened that to qreading).  Added a qwork category for technical docs I've emailed myself and I'm good to go.


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## luvmy4brats (Nov 9, 2008)

I just started working on this today. I think this may work. Thanks!


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## V (Jan 23, 2009)

So, I take it the K1 does _not_ search the text of the notes, only the K2? (if so, damn that's stupid)


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## Ann in Arlington (Oct 27, 2008)

I thought the K1 searched everthing on the Kindle. . .seems I've searched before and gotten result from the 'my clippings' book.  But I can't be sure.  When I get time I'll test it out. . .thanks for the hint.

One question though. . .maybe it's obvious to others. . . but, why prefix the tags with "q"?

Thanks,

Ann


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## WolfePrincess73 (Dec 2, 2008)

Ann Von Hagel said:


> I thought the K1 searched everthing on the Kindle. . .seems I've searched before and gotten result from the 'my clippings' book. But I can't be sure. When I get time I'll test it out. . .thanks for the hint.
> 
> One question though. . .maybe it's obvious to others. . . but, why prefix the tags with "q"?
> 
> ...


Prefix with "q" so when you type in your search request it doesn't include in the results every "romance" it finds. It will only return results for "qromance" which will be the books you have tagged.

This works great for me. It is taking a little time to go in and add notes to all my books, but once complete it will be easy to keep up.


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## Tillamook Bay (Mar 3, 2009)

I forgot to mention serieses (plural of series, lol).  I've tagged books in a series with qs1, qs2, etc., so that when I finally get around to them I'll know what order to read them in. 

lg


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## Tillamook Bay (Mar 3, 2009)

Well, I'll be! They must have sneaked this into the last firmware update.

Why on Earth would they do this and not hype it?  This could be why I never got an answer to my suggestion to CS that they add this feature to the K1 - they already did.  I feel like an idiot. 

Happy tagging!

lg


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## davem2bits (Feb 2, 2009)

Hey, cheesehead.  I'm over in PDX.    

Thanks for the heads up.


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## Vegas_Asian (Nov 2, 2008)

looking at k1...it says version 1.2 what version does yours' say


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## ScottBooks (Oct 28, 2008)

I think mine has always done this. I know it searched my notes in November when I was trying to find something in Gone For Soldier. Maybe it only found notes in my Clippings file? Hmmm, if I think of any other times I used search last Fall for something not in a book I'll let you know.


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## V (Jan 23, 2009)

Tillamook Bay said:


> The K1 also searches notes now!


I tested this last night and it was a constant sea of "not found" when I tried to search for key-text in notes.


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## Ann in Arlington (Oct 27, 2008)

WolfePrincess73 said:


> Prefix with "q" so when you type in your search request it doesn't include in the results every "romance" it finds. It will only return results for "qromance" which will be the books you have tagged.


Ah. . .that makes a ton of sense. . .maybe even two tons. . . I'll have to play on my K1 and see if it works there too. . .

Ann


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## Steph H (Oct 28, 2008)

As I noted (ha ha) in the other thread, it does work on K1 according to the Amazon threads (haven't tried it myself), just takes longer to process because of indexing apparently. So you can't search right away like you can in K2, I guess.


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## V (Jan 23, 2009)

I did manage to get it to work with the K1.

K1s seem to have some...shall we say "suboptimal" coding in the indexing department over K2s. I expected some optimization with the K2s, that they'd be maybe 20-25% faster but even at 2x the K2's time, I got nothing on my K1 so I assumed it just didn't search MyClippings.

I found that I had to wait between 60-90 minutes for the K1 to find updates to MyClippings in it's search. I've no idea what the schedule is for updating the index (one would assume it was event driven but...you never know) but I tried out of sleep mode, in sleep mode, post IPL, etc. Nothing I do seems to make it faster than ~60 minutes before new tags are recognized. It's like it doesn't incrementally update the index but _completely rebuilds it_ -- and that scares me a bit about the level of code on the device.

I'm going to take out my SD chip and par down the internal library to 10 pages or so and see if it improves the time.


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## Tillamook Bay (Mar 3, 2009)

Just to be clear - your notes exist in some place other than the "My Clippings" file.  You can delete "My Clippings", and your notes will still be there, hidden somewhere.

"My Clippings" seems to be nothing more than a log of every one of your alteration events.  Empty that log all you want; it just starts growing again as you make notes, bookmarks, etc.  

lg


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## V (Jan 23, 2009)

Tillamook Bay said:


> Just to be clear - your notes exist in some place other than the "My Clippings" file. You can delete "My Clippings", and your notes will still be there, hidden somewhere.


I guess that's good and bad (I couldn't fathom why they'd store the notes in a flat text file). However, you were supposed to be able to make a note, expound upon it by editing myclippings directly, and have that available in the note. However, as essentially a log file, this wouldn't work; and moreover I tested it and the data feed doesn't appear to be bi-directional (i.e., using an updated myclippings to update the hidden note table) though with a K1 you never know how fast something is supposed to happen.

I'm constantly amazed at how something so simple is made frustratingly complex and intractable when the same or less effort could go into making it streamlined and straight-forward. If they were charging for Kindle Addons to do this tagging-and-bagging I could understand the microsoftian design-underthinking but they aren't and deified flying green goat cheese on a swizzle-stick this is almost punitively designed to dead-end just this side of masochistic.


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## Gertie Kindle (Nov 6, 2008)

V said:


> I found that I had to wait between 60-90 minutes for the K1 to find updates to MyClippings in it's search. I've no idea what the schedule is for updating the index (one would assume it was event driven but...you never know) but I tried out of sleep mode, in sleep mode, post IPL, etc. Nothing I do seems to make it faster than ~60 minutes before new tags are recognized. It's like it doesn't incrementally update the index but _completely rebuilds it_ -- and that scares me a bit about the level of code on the device.


On your search results page, you should see a list of books that need to be indexed. You can wait for them to be indexed eventually, or you can select the first book on the list and just let it run for a while. Yes, it takes a long time, but once it is done, it's done.

I hope that helps.


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## Tillamook Bay (Mar 3, 2009)

V said:


> I guess that's good and bad (I couldn't fathom why they'd store the notes in a flat text file). However, you were supposed to be able to make a note, expound upon it by editing myclippings directly, and have that available in the note. However, as essentially a log file, this wouldn't work; and moreover I tested it and the data feed doesn't appear to be bi-directional (i.e., using an updated myclippings to update the hidden note table) ...


Haha. They gotcha, but not as bad as they got me. I first tagged all my opened books with 'qopen' and all my unopened books with 'qunopened'. Then I decided that it would be easier to simply use 'qo' and 'qu' instead, so I plugged my K2 into the computer and edited "My Clippings" file, changing every instance of these two tags. When I was finished, voila - the notes were exactly the same as they were before. I had to actually select every book, open the note and edit each note separately, basically doubling the amount of time it took to get the whole job done.

Therefore, here's some advice: try to figure out what all your tags are going to be before you begin. Don't try to edit notes by editing the "My Clippings" file; that won't work. 

lg


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## KindleKay (aka #1652) (Jan 20, 2009)

Forgive me....I just added some notes to my title page of some books on my K1 (about 4) and then did a search and got no results  

What am I doing wrong?  I thought I read that K1 searched notes in books?!?!

(I used "qfreebie" as a tag as well as "qscifi")


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## V (Jan 23, 2009)

KindleKay said:


> What am I doing wrong? I thought I read that K1 searched notes in books?!?!
> 
> (I used "qfreebie" as a tag as well as "qscifi")


"qFreebie" and "qscifi" are reserved words and you can't use them, sorry.

Actually, if you read my crabby notes above (it's still legal in most states) you'll see you just need to hang about for a while.



gertiekindle said:


> On your search results page, you should see a list of books that need to be indexed.


I know about it, occasionally during my testing one (out of 5-6 updates) would show up like that but it would miss the rest of them in that iterative testing cycle. I'm still scratching my head about it but I've taken this method: Insert a lot of tags, plug in Kindle, go do something else. The sheer number of books I have to tag up is...kinda depressing when you think about how you can only skip to page 9 of your index then have to page-forward over and over (and over and over), update one book, then...skip to page 9 and...repeat... Actually that's not so bad doing it in fits and starts while waiting for something else or watching TV but I'm starting to really hate that rotten little keyboard with it's lack of copy/paste.


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## Ann in Arlington (Oct 27, 2008)

V said:


> ...kinda depressing when you think about how you can only skip to page 9 of your index then have to page-forward over and over (and over and over), update one book, then...skip to page 9 and...repeat...


Actually, I discovered. . .through someone else hangin' out on the boards here. . .that you can go past 9. You just have to enter the two digits in fairly rapid succession. Like. . . 1 2 and not 1 . . . .2. Give it a try!

As to the K1 tagging. . .I am thinking that I will leave that project for after tax season. I hope to get my many many samples read and then either delete them or delete them and buy the book. Once I have done that much organizing, maybe I'll go on to the tagging. . . .

Ann


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## V (Jan 23, 2009)

Ann Von Hagel said:


> Actually, I discovered. . .through someone else hangin' out on the boards here. . .that you can go past 9. You just have to enter the two digits in fairly rapid succession. Like. . . 1 2 and not 1 . . . .2. Give it a try!


I coulda sworn I tried that way back when I first got over a dozen pages and it didn't work -- of course, what I'd read then said you had to press 'alt-n' not just 'n' so that may have had me messed up. I'll give it a try.

Edit: I tried it and it works wonderfully! Thank you, thank you, thank you. You've _no_ idea how happy that makes me.


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## Ann in Arlington (Oct 27, 2008)

V said:


> Edit: I tried it and it works wonderfully! Thank you, thank you, thank you. You've _no_ idea how happy that makes me.


Happy to be of assistance. . .

Ann


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## KindleKay (aka #1652) (Jan 20, 2009)

OK- This is BIZARRE!!!

This morning (Sunday)....I again attempted a seach for qfreebie and I got returned results almost immediately (less than 15 seconds) for the handful of book that I added that tag to yesterday!!

I have a K1.

My only conclusion is that K1 DOES search the notes, but you have to leave your Kindle1 on and let it do it's indexing thing.  Then, after about a day, the search/tag function will work on K1!!!!  ooooh!  This is exciting!  I am going to go through all my Kindle books today and tag them in notes (I have been adding the tag notes to the title page of the eBook)  Then tomorrow, I will test my theory that it WILL work!

This is a round-about form of organization, but it is still a form of organization!!!  Yippee-Skippy!!!


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## Tillamook Bay (Mar 3, 2009)

Yesterday I bought a huge anthology of 41 "hard" SF stories. I decided to tag them as qscifi, qshort (shorter than a novel), qu (unread), and q[author's surname]. After allowing some time for indexing I went to the Home Page and, just for fun, did a search on qscifi qu. I expected to see a link to each note on the same pages as the links to all my scifi books - maybe 75 notes. That's not what I got!

What I got was a link to the anthology with a little (41) next to it, and a link to each of the other scifi books, with a (1) by each of them. Of course. Because the Kindle doesn't know that each story is a separate entity; it just knows about the anthology...

and it's title! When I then clicked on the link to all 41 notes in the anthology There were 41 notes that all said "qscifi qu qshort q[author's surname]" and no story title. Duh. So I had to go back and edit each note, adding the title to the front end of the note. (when editing a note beginning at the front bump the 5-way UP and the cursor will appear at the beginning)

So, this is a heads up to anyone who's meticulous enough to want to tag all the stories in an anthology: add the story titles as you go or you won't see them in the link list after the search.

lg


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