In praise of Evernote search (but not the documentation)

[Mike P 2,624]

I was reminded today of the ability to search the note url using the advanced search syntax. I wanted to find any notes which I had clipped from Tim Harford's website which I had forgotten to tag with Tim_Harford (I need a tag as some notes come from other sources)

sourceurl:https://timharford* -tag:Tim_Harford

EN search is not perfect, but this sort of detailed search is really useful, and makes it definitely worthwhile learning the Evernote search grammar. https://dev.evernote.com/doc/articles/search_grammar.php

Sadly though, the documentation needs updating. Even long standing hacks such as sourceurl: are not referenced, yet alone more recent search strings like contains: (although you will find it elsewhere in the documentation)

Come on Evernote. Your search is great - get the main search syntax documentation upto date so everybody can easily find what they need.

[Paul A. 609]

Good feedback. It's frustrating when documentation doesn't reflect reality. Perhaps @Nick L.or @Scott T.could help make sure this gets to the right place internally.

[PinkElephant 8,071]

This is only partial true. The documentation for the „Source“ operator is found in this document.

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

However it misses the sourceurl version. I am not sure how much of this is intentional, and how much of it are „Easter Eggs“ created, but not documented by one of the devs who has worked for EN and left in recent years. We know there are people in the trade who love coding, but hate documentation.

So yes, maybe somebody needs to sit down and try to find all possible „triggers“ for a search. It must have one place where every search term is passed through, and usually you own your own source code to see into which direction it is forking.

The Contains command was documented here, but not in the above document that says about itself it is „complete“

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