Word Search Rules Misleading

[royoftt 0]

There is an Evernote Developers' article entitled "All things Evernote Search - Search Grammar". It's quite comprehensive. Here's the part that I think is incorrect:

Matching literal terms

If no advanced search modifier is found in a search term, it will be matched against the note as a text content search. Words or quoted phrases must exactly match a word or phrase in the note contents, note title, tag name, or recognition index. Words in the content of the note are split by whitespace or punctuation. Words may end in a wildcard to match the start of a word. Searches are not case sensitive. (A wildcard is only permitted at the end of the term, not at the beginning or middle for scalability reasons on the service.) Multiple whitespace and/or punctuation characters in the quoted phrase or the note will be compared as if they were a single space. The backslash escape character ('\') may be used to escape a quotation mark within a quoted phrase. E.g.:

potato

matches: "Sweet Potato Pie"

does not match: "Mash four potatoes together"

-potato

matches: "Mash four potatoes together"

does not match: "Sweet Potato Pie"

When I search for "potato" in Evernote Notes, I find both "Sweet Potato Pie" and "Mash four potatoes together". When I search using "-potato", the search finds and the deletes both of these phrases from the search results.

I must be missing something. Perhaps I'm completely misunderstanding what they're saying.

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

Hi. Which client are you using?

 

The Evernote search grammar is for developers, and so it talks about how the service handles searches, and doesn't specify any particular client. Although the service on the server works the same for everyone, the information fed into it might be altered. For example, some clients secretly append an asterisk to searches. Others don't. This can result in different behaviors from apparently identical searches. Most people probably don't notice discrepancies like this, but they do exist, and the behavior can change with updates to a particular client that happen to modify how searches are handled. Perhaps the asterisk is the answer. Try searching for "potato" instead of potato and see what happens.

[royoftt 0]

Hi. Which client are you using?

 

The Evernote search grammar is for developers, and so it talks about how the service handles searches, and doesn't specify any particular client. Although the service on the server works the same for everyone, the information fed into it might be altered. For example, some clients secretly append an asterisk to searches. Others don't. This can result in different behaviors from apparently identical searches. Most people probably don't notice discrepancies like this, but they do exist, and the behavior can change with updates to a particular client that happen to modify how searches are handled. Perhaps the asterisk is the answer. Try searching for "potato" instead of potato and see what happens.

 

I'm using Evernote 5.5 Premium on my iMac (Mavericks OS 10.9.2) and my iPad Mini 7.0.6. I'll try "potato" ever though I can't imagine anyone suing that instead of potato for a simple text search. No examples given in anything I've ever read suggests quotations unless it's for combining words into one search term..

[jefito 5,589]

The search grammar is honored, but as GrumpyMonkey says, some clients (Windows, I know for sure) treat text searches as if you have an asterix character ('*') at the end of each text search string. In effect, searching for potato (no quotes) will be treated as if you had typed "potato*", and will find notes that contain words beginning with the sequence "potato" (Windows users can verify this using the Search Explanation panel). This is done as a convenience to users, as far as I know (I seem to recall an Evernote staffer saying that in the forums, though I can't locate the quote). If you want to circumvent that behavior, you should enclose the text string in double quotes (also as GM says). The search grammar is a developer document, and it's useful as such (though even that is somewhat incomplete): if you submit a search through the Everntoe API, I don't believe that you would get the wildcard behavior; you'd get a strict search. The wildcard behavior should be documented, but I haven't found anything that does in the Evernote Knowledge Base; even the Advanced Search Syntax article (http://evernote.com/contact/support/kb/#!/article/23245321) doesn't mention it (thoughit has other useful tidbits).

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

 

Hi. Which client are you using?

 

The Evernote search grammar is for developers, and so it talks about how the service handles searches, and doesn't specify any particular client. Although the service on the server works the same for everyone, the information fed into it might be altered. For example, some clients secretly append an asterisk to searches. Others don't. This can result in different behaviors from apparently identical searches. Most people probably don't notice discrepancies like this, but they do exist, and the behavior can change with updates to a particular client that happen to modify how searches are handled. Perhaps the asterisk is the answer. Try searching for "potato" instead of potato and see what happens.

 

I'm using Evernote 5.5 Premium on my iMac (Mavericks OS 10.9.2) and my iPad Mini 7.0.6. I'll try "potato" ever though I can't imagine anyone suing that instead of potato for a simple text search. No examples given in anything I've ever read suggests quotations unless it's for combining words into one search term..

 

 

I'm using a Mac as well. As far as I know, there is a wildcard secretly appended to every regular search, and the only way to remove it is to use quotation marks. I'm not terribly keen on this policy, but I am afraid it has been like this for a while now (years?), and is unlikely to change. 

[jefito 5,589]

The wildcarding is convenient, and I know about it, so it doesn't lead to surprises in my case. I know that I can always quote if I really, really need to. It's one of those gray-area choices that UI, excuse me HID or whatever, folks need to make all the time. I can deal with either case with the same lack of facility.

 

But it should be better documented...

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

The wildcarding is convenient, and I know about it, so it doesn't lead to surprises in my case. I know that I can always quote if I really, really need to. It's one of those gray-area choices that UI, excuse me HID or whatever, folks need to make all the time. I can deal with either case with the same lack of facility.

 

But it should be better documented...

 

I don't like it.

 

However, my main complaint is (as always) with lack of documentation. It occasionally changes on different clients, searches return different results when things are run differently on the backend, and it becomes messy very quickly. I suppose, if I only used one client, I wouldn't care much. I use Android, iOS, Windows, and Mac, though, so it is annoying. Then again, over the years I have decided to file this away in the "things I cannot change" notebook, so now I just accept it as it is and move on to other stuff.

[royoftt 0]

Seems like this has drifted afield from my original question. The text explanation on potato searches is demonstrably wrong on very simple text searches in my Evernote. It makes no sense to me since their explanation was non-existent in the preceding paragraph of their document. I have never seen the result they have put forth in any search that I have done and it's counte-intuitive. So I go forth with the conclusion that in normal circumstances, their statements about the potato searches is incorrect.

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

Seems like this has drifted afield from my original question. The text explanation on potato searches is demonstrably wrong on very simple text searches in my Evernote. It makes no sense to me since their explanation was non-existent in the preceding paragraph of their document. I have never seen the result they have put forth in any search that I have done and it's counte-intuitive. So I go forth with the conclusion that in normal circumstances, their statements about the potato searches is incorrect.

 

I don't think we have drifted anywhere. The document you cited is for developers who work directly with the Evernote servers. There may be minor discrepancies between the server (the backend) and the clients (the front end), depending on what developers do when they build their clients. The search you and I use has to go through the Mac client, and the developers decided to append the asterisk,  so the search will not work as it is stated in the developer document. The document isn't incorrect. It is correct (though incomplete) if you are a developer working directly with the servers.

 

The problem (as I see it) is that the behavior for each client is insufficiently documented. I'd point you to an advanced search list for the Mac, but it doesn't exist. Of course, that is why we are hunting around in developer documents trying to piece this together.

 

The workaround for the appended asterisk is to put quotation marks around the search term(s). I could be wrong, but I don't think the minus search will work on the Mac because the secret asterisk broke it. If someone knows how to get that to work, let us know!