Markdown Stripping in Search Results

I've been thinking a lot about search quality lately. You know that moment when you search for something on your own site and the results come back with half your markdown syntax tangled up in the snippet? Asterisks, backticks, link brackets—it's noise. It gets in the way of actually understanding what the result is about.

So we made a decision: on Jottings PRO sites, search snippets no longer include markdown syntax.

The Problem We Were Solving

When you write on Jottings, you use markdown. It's natural, it's flexible, and it lets you focus on writing without fighting a visual editor. But markdown syntax isn't meant for readers—it's meant for writers and systems.

Here's what a typical search result looked like before:

**Building a [Second Brain](https://example.com)** for your note-taking system
with **markdown** support and `code snippets`. Learn how to organize...

See what I mean? The asterisks for bold, the brackets for links, the backticks for code—they're still there, cluttering the preview. A visitor searching your site doesn't care about the markup. They care about understanding what's on the page.

What We Changed

Now, when someone searches a Jottings PRO site, they see clean, rendered text:

Building a Second Brain for your note-taking system with markdown support
and code snippets. Learn how to organize...

Much better. The bold is gone (we didn't need visual emphasis in a snippet anyway). The link brackets are gone. The backticks are gone. What remains is pure, readable content.

Why This Matters

Better user experience. Visitors searching your site aren't thinking about your tech stack—they're thinking about whether your content answers their question. Clean snippets let them focus on the meaning of the content, not the markup.

Professionalism. There's something off about seeing raw markdown in search results. It signals that the site isn't quite polished. Stripping it out feels more intentional, more finished.

SEO signals. Search engines prefer clean, readable snippets. When your search results look polished, it builds trust. People are more likely to click through to a page when the snippet actually makes sense.

Consistency with the web. When you visit a site and search within it (or see the site in Google results), you don't see markdown syntax. Why should your site be any different? We're just bringing Jottings in line with how search should actually work.

How We Did It

On the backend, our search indexing strips out markdown syntax before storing the searchable text:

• **bold** becomes bold
• [text](url) becomes text
• `code` becomes code
• # Heading becomes just Heading

We preserve the meaning while discarding the syntax. The snippet generation then pulls clean text and displays it without any leftover markup.

This happens at index time, not at query time. That means search is fast, and the experience is consistent every time.

The Philosophy Behind It

This change reflects something I've been thinking about a lot: the difference between writing tools and reading experiences.

Markdown is a wonderful writing tool. But we shouldn't force writers' tools onto readers. When someone visits your Jottings site, they're reading—not writing. They shouldn't see the scaffolding. They should see the finished result.

The same philosophy applies to other parts of Jottings. We don't show raw metadata. We don't expose technical details. We present your thoughts in the clearest, most readable way possible.

For Free Users

If you're on the free plan, your site still works exactly the same way. We wanted to make this a PRO feature because search quality is part of the premium experience. It's one of many ways we help PRO sites stand out and feel more polished.

(And yes, if you're not on PRO yet and you want search snippets without markdown syntax, that's a great reason to upgrade. Just saying.)

What's Next

We're always thinking about ways to make search better. Next on our list: smarter excerpt generation that understands context, better handling of code blocks and quotes, and improved ranking for more relevant results.

But for now, if you've got a PRO site on Jottings, the cleaner search snippets are live. Try searching for something on your site and see how it looks. I think you'll notice the difference immediately.

Have thoughts on search quality? I read every email. Feel free to reach out—I'd love to hear what you think about this change.