"Search Notes..." doesn't always open to the location of the searched for word/phrase

[Hawk 1]

For me the ability to search all of my notes for a specific word/phrase is a critical function. I have found that that often times, Evernote does this properly. It finds the searched for word/phrase, highlights it in yellow, and opens the corresponding note directly to the location of the found and highlighted term. The problem is that often times with long notes it does not open to this location. I then have to scroll the note to find the highlighted word/phrase. If the word/phrase occurs more than once in a specific note, finding the next highlighted word/phrase requires more scrolling and searching for a yellow highlight, which isn't too easy to find if the note already has yellow highlighted content. 

Evernote does have a search within the a note function that works really well. I found that once the global "Search Notes..." function identifies a specific note that is long and has multiple occurrences of the searched for word/phrase, I can than open that note, than press Command-F, and the number of found instances will appear in an extremely useful search box. Arrows also appear allowing me to easily advance or return to each occurrences.

I suggest that Evernote consider changing the global search function to open each note to automatically display this extremely useful search box. This saves the user from having to press Command-F in every note that the global search finds, and adds the functionality of displaying how many instances were found in the note, and the advance or return arrows. 

Thanks for your consideration for fixing a bug and improving the search functionality.

 

 

 

[gazumped 12,075]

Hi.  So you're saying that while Search works fine,  and Search within Notes works fine.  you'd just like to have the system switch netween them to save you the trouble of hitting Ctrl+F from time to time?

[Hawk 1]

The global search has a bug. It does not always automatically open to the location of the searched for term. Actually, it sometimes doesn't highlight the searched for word/phrase at all. These are likely two separate bugs.

You can try this by trying to searching for a couple common word, for me searching for the words "people" and "the" demonstrates the bug. It seems to be best seen if you scroll to some note at the bottom of the list of notes in the "Search results." Sometimes selecting a note from the "Search results" will show nothing will be highlighted. But if I press Cmd+F,  the search term will correctly be highlighted in yellow.

 

[Mike P 2,982]

6 hours ago, Hawk said:

I suggest that Evernote consider changing the global search function to open each note to automatically display this extremely useful search box

I'm sure there would be as many people who do not want this opened by default as do want it opened. Ctrl+F doesn't seem to be too onerous.

Again, automatically scrolling to the found word will have supporters and opponents. Just because I have searched for a word does not necessarily mean I want to find where that exact word is in the note. Scrolling also hides the note title. I like how Ctrl+F is automatically populated with the search term and the enter key cycles though the instances of the word.

[gazumped 12,075]

...and single word searches will get you thousands of hits, including partial words and misspellings.  Far better to search for multiple keywords including something unique like a part number, address or date.

Image OCR also uses a hierarchy of possible meanings for each imaged word - the actual word "horse" might also be indexed as 'home' or 'house' or all three might be applied to another word entirely - so a 'found' note might appear not to contain a match at all.

If you're genuinely having trouble with searches you could try rebuilding your database from the server by signing out and choosing not to keep your locally stored database.  When you sign back in your account and search indexes will be rebuillt from the server.  (Depending on your account size this can take from minutes to hours.)

If that doesn't work,  then Support would be the next best option.  (Support is not us:  mainly other users here...)