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Search very slow and unreliable since 10.12.6


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Yesterday I installed version 10.12.6 (2583) on my Mac.

Now searching is terribly slow and sometimes I'm getting no results, though there should be.
When I do the same search in Evernote Legacy, I get correct results instantaniously.

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I installed the same version. Search doesn't work any more. Even if I go to the browser version I can't search any more. Some searches do result some results, but they don't yield the correct result. For example, it can't even find things that are obviously visible in the new Home page. I usually search by keywords in the title and I verified that the notes do exist - they just don't show up through the search functionality.

I tried uninstalling Evernote, while also removing the folder with Evernote in the name in the "/Users/.../Library/Group Containers/" folder (on macOS Big Sur with M1 processor), and then installing Evernote again, but this didn't solve the problem.

The weirdest part is that the issue started happening after I installed the update, but when I go to the web version (which I didn't use in ages) it has the same issue.

A colleague of mine didn't update Evernote in a long while and still has version 7 installed on his computer. I'll give that one a try - hopefully it can temporarily alleviate the problem. If not we'll need to move to a different note solution since we use this on a daily basis with our sales and project management team of 3 people. I need to be able to retrieve previous sales call notes while in a call. Someone recommended 'Notion' as an alternative to Evernote which I will look into if we can't find a solution for this within the next 1-3 business days.

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7 minutes ago, bernardfrancois said:

The weirdest part is that the issue started happening after I installed the update, but when I go to the web version (which I didn't use in ages) it has the same issue.

Search happens on the server not in the local client. This also means search is largely independent of the version or the platform you are using. If there is a problem with search on the server it is never acknowledged by EN, we see a spike in search related problems in the forums (as we are at the moment) and it resolves itself within a few hours. 

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2 minutes ago, Mike P said:

Search happens on the server not in the local client. This also means search is largely independent of the version or the platform you are using. If there is a problem with search on the server it is never acknowledged by EN, we see a spike in search related problems in the forums (as we are at the moment) and it resolves itself within a few hours. 

On iOs I can choose to keep my notes locally or not.
On the Mac, they should be kept locally. At least that's what I thought ...

So what you are saying now is that, if I don't have access to the internet, I can't search my notes any more on my Mac?

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Is there a way to force using Evernote offline on macOS (without requiring any third party software to limit internet access to specific applications)?

I understand this would limit searches to locally cached content - which would be way better than the current functionality were the searches I want to do yield no result at all...

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1 hour ago, hpuype said:

So what you are saying now is that, if I don't have access to the internet, I can't search my notes any more on my Mac?

I've had mixed experience of searching when offline on a desktop computer so I can't say anything definitive. Filtering and searching also work differently. What I am pretty sure about is that indexing happens on the server. 

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On 5/3/2021 at 11:16 AM, Mike P said:

Search happens on the server not in the local client. This also means search is largely independent of the version or the platform you are using. If there is a problem with search on the server it is never acknowledged by EN, we see a spike in search related problems in the forums (as we are at the moment) and it resolves itself within a few hours. 

I found a bit of time to do a test (basically because I needed access to certain notes) and ran the same search on Evernote on my iPhone as well as on my computer running macOS, and I got different result. I found 6 notes with a specific search query on my phone, and 0 notes with exactly the same search query on the computer.

Both devices were connected to the Internet. While I understand that only the server is guaranteed to contain my complete collection of notes, there seems to be an error in the macOS version, in either the caching of local notes or search index information on macOS, or in the way the server search functionality is used.

However, I tried by installing a very old version of Evernote (version 7) which still runs fine for a colleague of mine, and this also doesn't work for me. I tried to delete some cached files in my user's library folder on my mac, as I suspected there may be an issue with those, but this didn't help.

I will try to continue using it on my iPad and iPhone, hoping to avoid the issue on macOS for now, even though I ran out of the amount of switches I can make to different devices since I'm using the free version of Evernote. I'd be happy to becoming a paying customer if it offered any specific value, but starting a paid subscription as a workaround for a bug in the free version doesn't really feel right...

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So I ended up installing the iPad version of Evernote on my MacBook with M1 processor (by downloading it using the free trial of iMazing I was able to obtain and install the ipa file on my macBook). The user interface seems to work fine (of course I can't pop out any windows like I can with the macOS version of Evernote), but the issue remains: 

I still can't search and find my notes. I get zero search results for certain queries. This seems to confirm that there is some server issue and that perhaps it's working fine on my phone because it has certain local cache files which allows it to still find what I need. However, I need to work on an important document for work, and not being able to copy paste quickly from my notes is a real dealbreaker. I'll have to do without for now, but I hope someone from Evernote will review this thread and comment on it. Hoping for a solution some time soon...

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To make things more transparent: Could you post an example, maybe as a screenshot or a screen video ?

Did you use the search mask and filters, or did you try a search string using the EN search syntax as well ?

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