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iPhone search produces different results than Mac


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I use both a Mac and an iPhone.  Just realized that some of the search results do not produce the same outcome.

Eg:  I recently did a search for entries about the website "netflix" and found 10 notes via the Mac implementation, but only 9 notes on the iPhone.

Finally realized that the Mac implementation successfully finds "netflix" in a note containing "www.netflix";  the iPhone implementation fails to find it.

a.  I would expect the results to be the same on the two platforms.

b.  And it makes more sense that search would match "foo" in "www.foo"....so the iPhone should be like the Mac.

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That the different EN clients are not behaving in an identical manner is legendary.

Up to my knowledge, search is for the beginnings of words. So if a „word“ starts with www.xxx, to search for „xxx“ will not find it.

The search between mobile and desktop clients is different in a more fundamental way:

- On a desktop client (Win, Mac), you will search the local database, which is on your SSD/HDD.

- With the mobile clients (iOS, Android) you will search the cloud database, because there is no local copy of all the content.

One reason for differing results may be any notebook set to „local“ on a desktop. These will only exist there, not in the cloud. Their content can only be found when searching using the desktop client. One may try the same search using the web client, which will use the cloud database as the mobile clients do.

Other reasons can be differences between the database on the local drive vs. the cloud Version. Even when EN searches locally on a desktop, the cloud database is regarded as leading. „Lost notes“ out of a syncing conflict can lead to differences, as maybe corrupted data on the local copy, or duplicates from a syncing conflict on shared notes.

As long as the difference is 9 to 10, it should be possible to find out why there is this gap. And when identified, it may be worth to dig deeper, because there may be more to be found than just this one note not reflected.

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On 4/5/2019 at 1:09 PM, PinkElephant said:

Up to my knowledge, search is for the beginnings of words. So if a „word“ starts with www.xxx, to search for „xxx“ will not find it.

Not true for all platforms.  Windows works as one would expect based upon ENs rules, IMO.  Any special characters other than underscore are treated as blanks in EN searches.  IOS does not, which is based upon server searches.  

In Windows if you have www.xxx in a note, www.xxx or "www xxx" will find that note specifically plus any others with www.xxx in them (search magically becomes "www xxx").  OTOH, www or www xxx searches will find the note plus any other notes that contain www and xxx in whatever form.  Maybe the Mac is different.

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Just to be clear, this thread is about IOS.

On the Mac (and perhaps other platforms) if you have a note with www.xxx, a search for xxx will find it.

On IOS, however, the search will NOT find it.  [This can be somewhat disconcerting when you are out of the house, on your phone, and saying to yourself, "This search worked on my Mac, where is the darn note?!"]

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Yup, confirmed the issue.  There are also issues with IOS searches of PDFs.  Server side searches (either web or IOS) will not find all the notes that the desktop does.  FYI.

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* update: sometimes it seems there is some time needed until search results are available on all devices

 

same here, one note with an image - on my Mac it finds the note (searching for a word on that image) while on iOS and the Web version it's not found.

Strange, because I thought that OCR engine runs on the Cloud server of Evernote, so why only the Mac is able to find that one note.

And yes, of course, I do have OCR'd images in notes that are found on both, Mac OS and iOS.

I'm currently investigating a possible "come back" to Evernote...not a good entry

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Can you post an example ?

On the Mac the local search index is used, on any mobile device search is In general server based - but there is a sort of a local data base as well.If you switch to flight mode, you are still able to search in the EN app. It will show a notification that results may be reduced, but it stays searchable.

So if we compare the results, we have 3 search indexes that will be used. I do not expect from these to create exact matches.

But as I say, an example would be nice. If it is a picture, I would stick it into a note, sync it and see what I get after it was OCRed.

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12 hours ago, stocky2605 said:

* update: sometimes it seems there is some time needed until search results are available on all devices

 

same here, one note with an image - on my Mac it finds the note (searching for a word on that image) while on iOS and the Web version it's not found.

Strange, because I thought that OCR engine runs on the Cloud server of Evernote, so why only the Mac is able to find that one note.

And yes, of course, I do have OCR'd images in notes that are found on both, Mac OS and iOS.

I'm currently investigating a possible "come back" to Evernote...not a good entry

I'm with you I thought OCR of images only happens at the server.

Different, but I have had issues with search results for notes containing PDFs on desktop vs mobile/web.  PDFs that ScanSnap OCRs are more accurate in some cases than the ones performed at the servers.  Submitted a trouble ticket some time ago but nothing since.  Description of issue at the time:

The issue you're seeing is related to server-side search, which seems to have an issue with recognizing the wrong font when scanning PDF files. The text in the PDF is printed in a monospaced font, so the letters are wider, but the OCR sometimes incorrectly recognizes it as a non-monospace font, so it sees the gap in position and thinks there's a space there.

 

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Thanks for your observations. Thinking about it, maybe the OCR issue explains a lot, at least with regard to pdfs.

When using my ix500, it OCRs each pdf before uploading. With my iPhone and ScannerPro I do the same, using the scanner apps OCR before sending the result into EN. Because these documents come with OCR data, EN will not OCR them again. The advantage of the own OCR is among others the fact that I can choose the language(s) to use, which narrows down the dictionary that helps to proof the OCR result.

There are some pdfs created by the scanning capability of EN itself using the iPhone, and not too many pictures containing text to be OCRed on the servers. My search results typically are close to 100% similar on all my devices. I do not say they are perfect, but very close to each other when I do the same search on different clients. Maybe this is really based on the OCR source.

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  • 3 months later...

I've an issue here with a PDF containing the word "Überschwemmung" - it's not an OCR'ed one, just a PDF created out of 3rd party (text based) App. Search on Mac "Überschwemmung" finds exactly the note holding that PDF while on Web/iOS no notes are found.

 

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