Unexpected behavior with Search "Added" parameter

Anki Help
1

I’m trying to search for Notes that were added in the last n days. I’m finding that the results are not consistent with what I would expect.

With short timeframes, the search performs as expected: If I enter “Added:1” in the search box, I get Notes I added today. “Added:2” gets today and yesterday, “Added:3” gets the day before yesterday.

However, as the numbers increase the results start to look surprising. “Added:10” searched today (8/3/25) shows me Notes added as far back as July 22, which by my count is 13 days (including today and July 22).

The discrepancy increases with n. For example, this all started because I wanted to see all Notes made since 4/21, which by my count is 105 days. But when I enter “Added:105” it goes all the way back to 3/24, which is 133 days.

Am I doing something wrong here? Am I expecting the wrong result? Or is there a problem with how Anki is counting days?

Apologies if this duplicates an existing post. I tried various searches but the relevant terms (“added,” “search,” “browse,” etc.) are too generic and I couldn’t find anything related to my question.

2

I can’t reproduce this behavior in my own collection. When I search for “added:105”, it only includes notes created since 2025-04-21.

Do you see the same thing if you set the browser to show “Cards” instead of “Notes”? The “Notes” view will show a note if any of its cards matches the search criteria, which can sometimes be surprising. Do these notes have multiple cards, and were all the cards for a given note created at the same time?

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Interesting point. But no, that doesn’t seem to be it.

Edit: first of all, I didn’t answer your question, so I’ve deleted my earlier non-response.

Second, when I went back to look more closely, I realized things are stranger than I at first realized. The “created” dates for the search results are actually back to 3/24/2023.

It does seem, though, that the “card modified” fields all fall within the specified date range. The oldest one is 2025-05-06.

I have a theory about what’s happening. A lot of the cards in this deck had their Note type changed since they were first created. The new Note type had an additional Card associated with it.

Furthermore, for many of these Notes, I did not fill in the new Card info until it came up in the rotation.

I can’t reconstruct exactly when these changes happened but it’s quite possible that it was during the time in question.

I wonder if either changing the Note type, which included adding a new Card, or adding info to blank fields in the new Card, could be the reason for this behavior.

Still, the “created” field is showing a much earlier date than 105 days for many of these cards. If my theory that changing the Note type and adding a new Card is correct, that would seem to indicate a problem with the displayed info in the “created” field rather than with the search results themselves.

If simply adding info to the new Card, after it was created, caused the Card to appear in the results list, that would suggest a problem with the search results. I’d expect to get these results if I used “Edited” rather than “Added” in my search.

Hope all this makes sense. Thanks for the quick response.

4

The “Created” column is showing you the date that the note was created, but that’s not necessarily when any particular card was added. There are a few ways to add a card at a different time, some of which you noted – modifying the note type to produce additional cards, adding info to a different field that populates a front template, adding another cloze marker, etc.

That added search is looking for cards based on their card creation date, so you shouldn’t expect that it will necessarily match when the note was “Created.” For some of these ones that look mysterious to you, you can check their Card Info to see the “Added” date at the top. That should match your search results.

5

Thank you. That seems to be the explanation. I wasn’t tracking the difference in how the “Added” search and the “Created” column operate.

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