Search for "exact phrases" not working

[FrG 3]

Hello,

after a painful and time consuming switch/import from OneNote to EV, I find myself in basically the same situation: If I search for any exact phrase, I get hundreds of notes –those that contain the phrase, and those that contain only one of the words of the string.

Now, it seems that during the import, EV turned all the subfolders present in OneNote into tags, so that even if I use "---" to search for an exact string, since a tag is always automatically selected, the engine searches for both the phrase and any tag containing any of the words. Can this be the problem?

Looking in the forum I found that in previous versions of EV I could turn off "Automatically select child tags", but I don't seem to find this function in 10.9.10 nor in the Legacy version. Again, I am not even sure this is the issue.

Any help? Thanks!

[FrG 3]

Anyone?

[PinkElephant 8,094]

Maybe you find some ideas here:

https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/208313828-How-to-use-Evernote-s-advanced-search-syntax

 

https://dev.evernote.com/doc/articles/search_grammar.php

[gazumped 11,661]

7 minutes ago, FrG said:

Anyone?

Hi.  We're a (mainly) user-driven forum - though Evernote staffers will drop by to read content from time to time. We're definitely not support - thought most of us have used Evernote for years and can usually offer some (sometimes) helpful suggestions. It can take a while.

If we've not experienced what you're going through though,  it's hard to suggest a fix.  I don't think that a search for "<word1> <word2> <word3>" (including the quotes) should also find individual words,  even if they are tags.

It might be an idea to turn off the child tag option - which you'll need the Legacy version to find since v10 doesn't have too many options yet...

...and look at that;  you wait for days and two answers come along at almost the same time... 😊

[FrG 3]

23 minutes ago, gazumped said:

I don't think that a search for "<word1> <word2> <word3>" (including the quotes) should also find individual words,  even if they are tags.

Thank you for your help. And yet, the simple "<word1> <word2> <word3>" search is exactly what doesn't work. Legacy doesn't seem to have either the Tools > Options > Note to turn off the child tag. Mystery...

[gazumped 11,661]

Hmmn.  Well - you can either keep searching for a fix,  which will take an undefined amount of time,  or you can live with the issue and find a work-around.  I have a LOT of notes,  so tend to get false hits a lot in my searches - I just keep on adjusting titles and tags so that I can exclude incorrect hits and/ or force include the correct ones.  It may take some weeks,  but you should be back to more ordered search returns fairly quickly...

Remember you can also search for tag:<keyword> and intitle:<keyword> to exclude words in the body of the notes,  and use dates as well as search terms to narrow things down.

[FrG 3]

1 minute ago, gazumped said:

Hmmn.  Well - you can either keep searching for a fix,  which will take an undefined amount of time,  or you can live with the issue and find a work-around.  I have a LOT of notes,  so tend to get false hits a lot in my searches - I just keep on adjusting titles and tags so that I can exclude incorrect hits and/ or force include the correct ones.  It may take some weeks,  but you should be back to more ordered search returns fairly quickly...

Remember you can also search for tag:<keyword> and intitle:<keyword> to exclude words in the body of the notes,  and use dates as well as search terms to narrow things down.

Yeah, the fact is I moved a whole dissertation project with tons of notes, hundreds of pages, dozens of tabs and tags from ON to EV precisely because I couldn't search for exact phrases... I am starting to wonder whether it might be an indexing problem with my Macbook.... Thanks again!