Unexpected search results

[ghoffman 9]

When I search for "pdu", entered without the quotes, Evernote reports 18 notes found.  When I look at each of the 18 notes, I see the "pdu" text in 16 of the 18 notes.  The other 2 notes do not contain "pdu".  Find within note confirms that the text is not in these two notes.

 

When I search for "pdu ", entered with the quotes and with a space after the u, Evernote reports 15 notes found.

• The 2 notes that do not contain "pdu" were included in the 15 notes
• 2 of the 3 notes that were included in the first search results, but not in these results, DO contain "pdu"
• The 3rd note that was included in the first search results, but not in these results, DOES NOT contain "pdu"

I understand that quotes can be used to find an exact text string, for example "one two three".  I had hoped that meant that they could be used to find "pdu", but not find "pdus".  However it doesn't work that way.  When I search for "pdu ", Evernote finds and highlights "pdu", even though there is not a space after the search target.

Evernote 10.25.6, 4 notebooks, 11,084 notes

MacBook Pro 2019 32GB

macOS Catalina 10.15.7

[PinkElephant 8,819]

To find exactly PDU, try to type

“PDU “

with a space behind the search string inside of the quotation marks.

[ghoffman 9]

PinkElephant, Your suggestion is what I typed for the issue I'm reporting in the second paragraph of my initial post.  I put a space behind the search string inside of the quotation marks.  Evernote still reports strings that do not have a space after the search string.

[gazumped 12,071]

I think you're overlapping with this thread - 

 

...and I wonder if the notes that do not apparently contain the string you're looking for have illustrations that might be interpreted as containing text,  or have words that are somewhere near 'pdu'?  AFAICS as long as you get all the results you need,  having a few extras thrown in is easily survivable.  And this is exactly the sort of result I'd normally deal with by using a tag to make finding this groups easier and more accurate if and when I need to repeat the search.  I've dealt with databases containing hundreds of thousands of records,  and it's generally impossible to have a search return always exact results...

[PinkElephant 8,819]

Without knowing the notes it is a bit difficult to drill down to an individual search result.

Examples:

• Text in pictures will often be read by the OCR with several ways of spelling, to make sure something is found when the OCR result is not unambiguously.
• Text contained in hidden metadata (like in PDFs in a OCR layer) will make the note show, but will not show itself.
• Text contained in attachments will make the note show, but can be hard to find - for example an Excel file with the text in a comment attached to a spreadsheet cell.