search function is too limited, misses documents

[bfevans 1]

We all have a ton of notes.  But let's say you have a couple notes with phrases like "productpage" in one, and "productspage" in another.    Now you can search with the string "product" or "prod" and you see the notes in the results list.  Now, one would conclude you can also search for "page" or "duct"...  unfortunately those searches will not list those two notes at all.  

MS OneNote search, unix grep, and other tools all seem to yield the expected results, but searching in evernote, you often need to know exactly the phrase you're searching for in order to search for it, which of course isn't very useful, and sometimes you just won't find your notes.  

Anyone else see this as an issue?    I'm not saying we need regex match searching or anything (although that might be a nice feature) but we should definitely be able to search any portion of a string and not just from the beginning of it.

show of hands?

[gazumped 11,661]

Hi.  I agree it might be convenient on occasion to have a search that would return characters from anywhere in a string,  but equally searching for 'page' or 'duct' could get you an awful lot of false hits in a large database of clips. 

Evernote maybe feel we have enough options to find notes by title, tag, keyword, date, action (as in: done or not), source, or attachment type in ?? different languages including Chinese. 

See the attached cheat sheet for a (mostly) up to date summary... https://www.cheatography.com/senseful/cheat-sheets/evernote/

There's a full list here https://dev.evernote.com/doc/articles/search_grammar.php

It is a known fact that only the front end of strings is 'found' in searches,  so in your example 'pro' would be found,  but anything after the 'p' is missed.  It's possible to find things by so many other clues that I've never missed the feature in 8+ years of using the apps.  I tend to favour 'smart' titles for repeating items like projects or receipts,  and I have a 'Scanning Admin' note that lists,  in alpha order,  things like current project names so it's easy to give new notes a consistent title.

I also find that notes are often tied together with things like customer references that others created to ID my account,  but work rather well if I want to find forinstance all my 'phone bills and exchanges of correspondence with the 'phone company...

 

[JohnLongney 83]

@bfevans

both thumbs up in support!

(the bright people at EN plan to implement voice recognition and have not managed to provide better search as yet). 

I am now subscribing to automated export conversion and I cannot tell you how wonderful it is to have proper search again. 

[DTLow 5,736]

Just now, JohnLongney said:

I am now subscribing to automated export conversion and I cannot tell you how wonderful it is to have proper search again. 

Can you provided more details on the "automated export conversion"

[JohnLongney 83]

My backup/converter service  

Though premium is not cheap it is incredibly reliable and not restricted to Evernote. 

BTW: cloudHQ is one of those services that Evernote could team up with, if only to offer an attractive package to their own (paying) subscribers. For all parties involved it'd be a win-win situation with some extra cash for Evernote of course.

Evernote is now my 1st link in the work chain just used for collecting and editing. The 2nd link is the cloud drive fed by cloudHQ, notes automatically converted to pdf, which I regard as the current standard document format. On a cloud drive I can move anything personal to encrypted folders, My last and  3rd link is my own NAS system with genuine full search. No dependence on keywords, clean folder structure, logical naming rules, and with encrypted stuff not even appearing in Evernote any more, the .exb file is also less of a problem as well.

My way right now.