Issues with search and highlighting the searched word

[GiacomoLaw 134]

Hi all,

I'm encountering an issue where a word is not highlighted like it used to be when searching. I've searched for `succession`, however the succession on the note is not highlighted.

How can I fix this? I know I can control + f, however this is quite repetitive when I'm quickly scanning notes for information.

Thanks!

----

Edit: Also, why does it say my sub is basic? I have premium 😕. Also I just noticed that I have had reference spelt wrong for four years... 

[jefito 5,589]

I see this working fine in the 6.17.1.8179 beta. I tested using text that was found in a note link, as your example shows, as well.

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,938]

I also see it working properly, in v. 6.15. You might try completely exiting the program (File > Exit, not the red X box, which only closes the interface), then restarting it. Sometimes that will clear out some detritus in the program's share of memory.

[RavBoy 189]

I'm using 6.16.4.8094 (308094) Public (CE Build ce-58.1.6897)

It appears to be working fine on my app version for windows...see image

My question is... Should the word 'dog' in the Note Title + the Note List (Middle Vertical Pane) also be highlighted?

And on a different, small thing... but should the margin difference be so large as seen when using a check-box v a bullet point?

[CalS 5,280]

2 hours ago, RavBoy said:

Should the word 'dog' in the Note Title + the Note List (Middle Vertical Pane) also be highlighted?

Not a part of current EN.  Doesn't mean a request couldn't be created for that if you feel it is important.

2 hours ago, RavBoy said:

And on a different, small thing... but should the margin difference be so large as seen when using a check-box v a bullet point?

This spacing appeared in a recent release.  Check boxes were more compact prior to that release.

[jefito 5,589]

1 hour ago, RavBoy said:

My question is... Should the word 'dog' in the Note Title + the Note List (Middle Vertical Pane) also be highlighted

Could be, I suppose, but I don't see a "should" there. The title is always going to be visible, unless it's very long, but the matching text in a note may not be in the portion that's displayed. This way, you can scroll to see any matches.

2 hours ago, RavBoy said:

And on a different, small thing... but should the margin difference be so large as seen when using a check-box v a bullet point?

Dunno. Bullets seem to be commonly indented, but I don't know that there are any intrinsic rules for bullets vs. checkboxes, which are unindented. I wouldn't want them to indent, since I commonly use checkboxes on bulleted items.

[RavBoy 189]

Cheers @CalS & @jefito  and still within the theme of this Posts Title "Issues with Search..."

Final question... but first, let me say I have never relied on EN Search, and the unreliable results it provides, NEVER!

Maybe its me, my approach, competency at using EN Search. though I have reviewed EN Info Resources:

• Search Grammar | All things Evernote search
• 11 Advanced Search Techniques to Quickly Find What You Need | Jun 2017
• Find what you need
• How to use Evernote's advanced search syntax

But as an example, I just clicked on my 'All Notes' ...(I have 4,038) then used the search bar and searched for:

• dog              = 235 notes
• "dog"            = 179 notes
• any: dog      = 235 notes
• any: "dog"   = 179 notes
• intitle:dog   = 6 notes
• tag:dog       = 0 notes

I promise, at most I would have just the 6 notes where the word 'dog' might appear as seen in the intitle:dog search result above.  I'm not a Vet by profession, or a dog owner, or do research/clipping of dog related stuff, so these 6 (mostly used when testing stuff on EN) should be it... so why am I getting so many bogus/false and waste-my-time search results?

When I sift through and randomly select one these 179 to 235 notes, then do a 'CTRL+F' (Find) to see where the word 'dog' appears in the notes content/body... It's Nowhere to be found, doesn't exist, simply returns 'No matches found' ! 

This is why, to date I've never bothered with EN Search!

Instead, I've always successfully relied on a Nested Folder/Notebook approach (Stacks>NoteBooks>Notes) with the heading of each note commencing with an ALL-CAPS subject descriptor + the use of Tags... always worked for me.

BUT...am I doing something wrong?  Any ideas why I get so many BS EN Search Results?

[jefito 5,589]

re: dog

At a guess, your search for "dog" is matching text recognition results. I found a note right off that had "dog" as a match for "document" (remember, it's dog*, implicitly) in an image; it matched for  a search of "doc" as well. The match got highlighted in the image, but Ctrl+F only works on actual text content in the note (as opposed to text recognition results), so you can't jump to it using that method.

BTW, with respect to a couple of your searches listed (e.g. "any: dog"), a search of the form "any: <search term>" is exactly the same as a search on <search term>.  The "any:" term requires two search terms in order for it to affect the search, as "any: <term1> <term2>" translates to <term1> OR <term2>.

I rely on search all the time; generally a combination of search terms and tags. Works for me...

[DTLow 5,736]

6 hours ago, RavBoy said:

then do a 'CTRL+F' (Find) to see where the word 'dog' appears in the notes content/body... It's Nowhere to be found, doesn't exist, simply returns 'No matches found' ! 

There's two different search engines being used.

The All Notes search makes use of a search index that is constantly updated.  It may have become out-of-date on your device.  On Macs, we have a "Rebuild Search Index" feature.

[DTLow 5,736]

22 hours ago, GiacomoLaw said:

Also, why does it say my sub is basic? I have premium 😕. 

@Shane D.    Here's another case

 

[jefito 5,589]

17 minutes ago, DTLow said:

On Macs, we have a "Rebuild Search Index" feature.

On Windows, you can do that, too. The way to do it is to hold down the Ctrl key while selecting "Help" from the main menu. That exposes a set of commands intended for use in customer support issues. There's a couple of search-related indexes you can rebuild.

I'm still guessing that it's OCR text recognition that's giving the false positives, though, given that I saw the exact same example where it was clearly text in am image.

[RavBoy 189]

1 hour ago, jefito said:

At a guess, your search for "dog" is matching text recognition results. I found a note right off that had "dog" as a match for "document" (remember, it's dog*, implicitly) in an image; it matched for  a search of "doc" as well.

+

38 minutes ago, jefito said:

I'm still guessing that it's OCR text recognition that's giving the false positives, though

Okay...so I scrolled through the list of 179 search results, and looked for notes that did NOT display a thumbnail image ( I use snippet view where a thumbnail image is shown if images in the note exist), and found 11 notes.  I then did a CTRL+F text search for "dog" on these 11 notes without a thumbnail... and YES, ALL these notes did indeed contain the word dog 🙂  So this confirms your guess, for me anyway, re OCR being at play (even though I couldn't see where they were getting "dog" from even with the images results)... which begs the question, 'Other then scrolling through a search-result-list looking for 'thumbnail-less' notes, How can I search/tell EN to search for TEXT ONLY in notes and ignore OCR Text Recognition???  ...and for sure if i search for "dog" I want "dog to be returned NOT "document"!

[RavBoy 189]

1 hour ago, DTLow said:

There's two different search engines being used.

The All Notes search...

What's the other one please?

1 hour ago, DTLow said:

search index that is constantly updated.  It may have become out-of-date on your device.  On Macs, we have a "Rebuild Search Index" feature.

41 minutes ago, jefito said:

On Windows, you can do that, too. The way to do it is to hold down the Ctrl key while selecting "Help" from the main menu. That exposes a set of commands intended for use in customer support issues. There's a couple of search-related indexes you can rebuild.

WHAT!?  I have to go into 'Customer Support Features' & do a 'Rebuild Search Index' just to get EN to give me more accurate search results...

How is this user friendly, hence my position this is not reliable..I can NOT rely on just going to the search bar and searching for "dog".  I'm gonna have to get a dog after all this 😉

But seriously...So I should be rebuilding my search index in the EN windows client...and this should fix the problem, right???  Okay I will do some reading on this then give it a go and see how it affects the search results for "dog"...cheers

 

[DTLow 5,736]

1 minute ago, RavBoy said:

What's the other one please?

There's two different search engines being used.

1. All Notes search...
2. Text search within note ( 'CTRL+F')

[RavBoy 189]

38 minutes ago, RavBoy said:

'Other then scrolling through a search-result-list looking for 'thumbnail-less' notes, How can I search/tell EN to search for TEXT ONLY in notes and ignore OCR Text Recognition???

To answer my own question above, I learned that using the following search command/syntax:

"dog" -resource:image/*

Instead of 179 notes.... Only 24 notes were found, including notes that had MS Word docs or PDF docs attached... and within ALL these 24 notes (or within the notes embedded documents), "dog" was indeed found... yippee

 

[jefito 5,589]

52 minutes ago, RavBoy said:

WHAT!?  I have to go into 'Customer Support Features' & do a 'Rebuild Search Index' just to get EN to give me more accurate search results...

Not necessarily. The CS functionality is there so that a CS rep can try to diagnose and possibly fix problems with your Windows installation. But since they're  potentially dangerous (because software), they're hidden so that the casual user doesn't get confused by them or use them to try to fix something that's unrelated. Of course, once someone in the forums found out about them then they became a semi-open secret. That being said, they should probably not need to be run by most people. I think I optimized my database once, several years ago )to no effect, good or bad), but never any of the other ones. But some folks will use them anyways, sort of the same superstition that leads people to use registry cleaners and 3rd party disk defraggers and the like.

1 hour ago, RavBoy said:

How is this user friendly, hence my position this is not reliable..I can NOT rely on just going to the search bar and searching for "dog".

I think that your subsequent results have shown that search is a lot more reliable than you've indicated, and powerful, too. Nice find on the -resource:image/* term, btw.

[RavBoy 189]

2 hours ago, jefito said:

I think that your subsequent results have shown that search is a lot more reliable than you've indicated, and powerful, too. Nice find on the -resource:image/* term, btw.

Hey @jefito, yeah the subsequent results are more reliable but 'powerful'? ... I can't get there.  I mean adding the search syntax '-resource:image/*' simply removed 'matched notes with no images' meaning, as I understand it, that IF those notes also contained text, where the word 'dog' existed it would now NOT be included in the search results... hence i come full circle to search being unreliable for text based searches... hence why the argument for using tags more makes more sense

I think a great feature-request/idea would be to do as Google Search does:  You search for something, then it returns filtered results (using tabs) 

e.g. ALL  |  IMAGES |  VIDEOS |  SHOPPING etc...

Would be great if EN added a few buttons under the search bar that similarly provided filtered results...just a thought.  Or select search filter (other than existing All/Any) prior to searching

[jefito 5,589]

27 minutes ago, RavBoy said:

Hey @jefito, yeah the subsequent results are more reliable but 'powerful'? ... I can't get there.  I mean adding the search syntax '-resource:image/*' simply removed 'matched notes with no images' meaning, as I understand it, that IF those notes also contained text, where the word 'dog' existed it would now NOT be included in the search results... hence i come full circle to search being unreliable for text based searches... hence why the argument for using tags more makes more sense

'Powerful' is not synonymous with 'perfect', with respect to Evernote search (which is what I'm referring to), especially when something fuzzy like OCR is involved (and 'dog' is a pretty bad case for OCR, apparently; my use of search would tend to use longer terms). So now you know that if OCR is involved, you may get false positives; exclude them and you may miss valid matches -- your choice: knowledge is power. But Evernote's search is pretty easy and has some nice filtering capabilities, so yes, I'd call it powerful, though not as expressive as, say SQL. And not perfect; I think you'd find that I've made a number of search language suggestions over the years, if you looked.

That being said, I don't know that there's any argument at all over the power of tags (note that tags are also part of search's power). I use them extensively, in conjunction with text search (more evidence of search's power). It's not an either/or for me. Tags generally represent broad categorizations for me, that in their intersection allow me to filter to a small set of notes; adding text to a search narrows it further. My general aim is to get it down to fewer than 10 candidates; my eyes will take over from there.

No question that the various search UIs could be improved as well, but at some point, adding every option to a UI gets confusing to users. An aid to specify common content types could be helpful, also date ranges as well.

[CalS 5,280]

20 hours ago, RavBoy said:

But as an example, I just clicked on my 'All Notes' ...(I have 4,038) then used the search bar and searched for:

• dog              = 235 notes
• "dog"            = 179 notes

Something else to consider.  dog searches for any word that starts with dog.  "dog" searches for only the word dog.  So the delta could  include notes that have dogs or whatever in them. 

[jefito 5,589]

10 hours ago, CalS said:

Something else to consider.  dog searches for any word that starts with dog.  "dog" searches for only the word dog.  So the delta could  include notes that have dogs or whatever in them. 

Right you are (Yoda said that, not me), and that's reflected in the search information text shown (one of the most useful UI extras they ever added, to my mind): the first one says ,"contains  words starting with "dog"", while the second says "contains the word "dog"".

[GiacomoLaw 134]

Still having the issue - computer has been restarted many times. I click on the note, it briefly flashes the word, then it disappears.

If I click on the search button again when I am on the note, it shows the highlight box but as a weird line.

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,938]

Very weird. You may have done this also, but I want to bring up again the idea of completely exiting the program (File > Exit, not the red X box, which only closes the interface), then restarting it (or rebooting the computer). I know you've rebooted the computer; but in another thread recently, someone solved a problem with File > Exit, and then rebooting the computer, even though they had actually uninstalled Evernote and reinstalled it more than once. I begin to suspect that if the program closes without an explicit File > Exit, there may be something that it leaves behind on disk that is reloaded on a reinstall or reboot, which could contain corrupt information. Only a wild speculation, but perhaps worth a try.

[BillHertha 2]

I'm having a similar problem.  When I search, the relevant terms are highlighted in the text, however, when I scroll the text, the highlights remain in place while the text underneath moves on.  

I am running on the Mac Client (Version 7.6 (457299 App Store))

MacOS Mojave, version 10.14.2 (18C54)
iMac (Retina 5K, 27-inch, Late 2014)
Processor 4GHz Intel Core i&
Memory 32 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
Graphics AMD Radeon R9 M295X 4096 MB

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,938]

@BillHertha, hi, and welcome to the forums. This particular one is dedicated to technical issues on Windows. The Mac technical issues forum is here: https://discussion.evernote.com/forum/219-evernote-for-mac/.

[DTLow 5,736]

On 12/17/2018 at 3:22 AM, BillHertha said:

I'm having a similar problem.  When I search, the relevant terms are highlighted in the text, however, when I scroll the text, the highlights remain in place while the text underneath moves on.  

The highlight scrolling is a known Mac issue.  See the latest releast notes at https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/117913-evernote-for-mac-77-beta-1/

 

[DavidPierson 15]

On 12/8/2018 at 3:56 AM, RavBoy said:

To answer my own question above, I learned that using the following search command/syntax:

"dog" -resource:image/*

 

Give that man a cigar, and a free year of Premium. This is gold.

If only we could get a variation that includes text search while excluding OCR search results.  Evernote team, stage 1 would be to flag each search dictionary item with a source flag.