I am evaluating Highrise for enterprise use. Overall I’m excited by the feature set of Highrise. However, there is one troubling feature that I have a question about: the search functionality.

It is of utmost importance that we be able to perform accurate searches on the notes that are associated with our contacts – we have tens of thousands of contact items, each with various “note” style information: including biographical information, contact history, etc. All of this information must be quickly accessible.

The trouble I’m having is this: I create a few text contacts and paste some random information into the note and about fields. (I pasted some technical documentation into the “about section of one contact, such as the “Highrise API” document). Then I do a search for a keyword that I know exists in one of the “note” sections or in the “about” section of some contact. Let’s say for example I do a search for the following string: API

That keyword should be found in the contact in which I pasted the “Highrise API” document into the contact’s “About” section. However as I’m trying it right now, it doesn’t work.

On second thought, I enter the following string: “API”

This is found. However, it finds the world “Rapid”, bolding the letters “api” within the word “Rapid”.

OK, let’s try another one: “Ruby on Rails”

I want to find that exact string, hence the use of quotes. Unfortunately, the search function takes to my contacts and finds all instances of “ruby”, all instances of “on”, and all instances of “rails”, including any words for which any of those are a substring (“alONe” and “introspectiON” for instance).

Since the work that we do depends so heavily upon searches, I need to know whether I’m doing searching wrong, or whether the search capabilities of Highrise will be at all adequate for our application.