Search No Longer Works on Mac Desktop app

[areese801 6]

Hi.  I'm using the Evernote for Mac app (Not downloaded from App store, but from the EN site itself).  The version is 7.14.

My search no longer works.  For example:  Searching for the work 'gift' to find my 'Holiday Gift Ideas' note, returns a note with a .pdf document containing an Appraisal I recently had done on my home.  ...That's it.  Maybe it contains the word 'gift' but it's certainly not the only note out of my thousands that does.  Search works fine on the web:  A query for 'gift' returns 66 results.  Rebooting didn't help.  Reinstalling didn't help.

I did a bit of Googling and there seems to have been a menu item, in the past, to rebuild search indices for the desktop app.  I can't find that in my menu now though so I assume it has been removed.

Is there a way to force a rebuild of search indices on my local machine?

[DTLow 5,736]

8 minutes ago, areese801 said:

Is there a way to force a rebuild of search indices on my local machine?

Hold down the option key when selecting the Help Menu

Help > Troubleshooting > Recreate Full Text Search Index

[areese801 6]

4 hours ago, DTLow said:

Hold down the option key when selecting the Help Menu

Help > Troubleshooting > Recreate Full Text Search Index

Ah.  The trick was holding down the option key.  Wonder why they keep it 'hidden' (??).  I've kicked off a reindex.  Thanks for the tip!

[PinkElephant 8,115]

It is documented in the EN help pages.

The functions are regarded as advanced. Maybe the idea is that users should not play around too often. On the windows client there are even more advanced functions - if applied in one go, you can really mess things up.

[EKinTheCity 0]

Hi - the same thing has happened to me. I'm running Evernote 7.14 on MacBook Air (OS Catalina). I followed the instructions to "Recreate Full Text Search Index". But still not returning the number of items I see for the same search when using Evernote for iOS. (For instance, iPhone app returns 90 items for the same search on MacBook air that now returns 67 items, up from 29 items). Does the indexing take a long time? How will I know when it's complete?  

[PinkElephant 8,115]

The indexing may take a while, depending on the size of the data base it has to reindex. There is no message when it is through. Maybe you can find it in the activities monitor (I have never looked it up, so no idea what the process is called).

There is another reason for a difference: EN iOS currently will not find any content in notebooks shared by others to you. If you have such notebooks, and the search may find content there, the iOS count will be lower than the Mac count. I know, it is the other way around in your case.

[areese801 6]

1 hour ago, EKinTheCity said:

Hi - the same thing has happened to me. I'm running Evernote 7.14 on MacBook Air (OS Catalina). I followed the instructions to "Recreate Full Text Search Index". But still not returning the number of items I see for the same search when using Evernote for iOS. (For instance, iPhone app returns 90 items for the same search on MacBook air that now returns 67 items, up from 29 items). Does the indexing take a long time? How will I know when it's complete?  

Re-indexing did end up doing the trick for me.  I'm not sure how long it took, but I waited several hours, then tested it by issuing a query in the Desktop app, observing the count of matches, then doing the same from Evernote on the web.

Who knows what's really going on under the hood.  I can only assume that the more notes you have, the longer the process will take and that (maybe?) some network communication takes place between your computer and Evernote's servers in the cloud.  I suppose that might introduce some overhead as well.

Hope this helps.

 

[DTLow 5,736]

7 minutes ago, areese801 said:

Who knows what's really going on under the hood.

For a peek, open the Activity Log in the Help menu   
It shows the reindexing progress

[Christiaan 1]

On 10/1/2020 at 8:15 AM, DTLow said:

Hold down the option key when selecting the Help Menu

Help > Troubleshooting > Recreate Full Text Search Index

This did the trick for me. Thanks!