Conducting multi tag searches in Springpad notebooks

If you are leveraging the tags in Springpad to organize your content, you may have found a feature has gone missing.  Due to the recent change in the system architecture, the ability to do an Advanced Search has been removed.  As a work around, you can do the following to perform complex searches and then save those searches for future reference.  I have only tried this on the web, and I know the save does not carry over to mobile, but it’s better than nothing.

Multi Tag Search

In the search box, enter the tags you are looking for in this format:

This will return any spring in the notebook that shares those two tags.  In situations when you have multi word tags, wrap the words in quotation marks like this:

#tag1 #”tag word2″

This works the same as just the tags but allows for multiple words.

Saving Searches

Springpad no longer offers a specific feature for saving advanced searches, but there’s no reason you can’t use a work around to accomplish the same thing.  Once you have run a search in a notebook and have your results, either bookmark the URL for the page or copy it and paste it into another note.  In either case, that new URL will now return a result page based on that search each time you use it, but it will contain the current notes at that time.