Searching For Exact Text String

[digirati 0]

Anyone else having issues searching for an exact search string in Evernote (both IOS and Mac Desktop app)? I try to search for VIN by using quotation marks like this, "VIN" but instead of getting only VIN I get 

Vinfast
Vindaloo 

and even other notes that don't have anything even resembling VIN. Very frustrating and Evernote Support is not helpful at all. Thank in advance!

[gazumped 11,830]

14 hours ago, digirati said:

instead of getting only VIN

Try including a trailing space - "VIN " or specifically include hits you don't want to see by "-" as in "VIN " -vinfast

[Mike P 2,821]

Evernote search these days is a bit unpredictable.

I initially thought I had replicated your problem. I searched for "hang" and I got lots of notes containing words highlighted that contained hang (including words like change). However,  in each case, when I actually searched through the note it did also contain the word hang. Highlighting words that do not meet the search criteria is confusing and unhelpful.

14 hours ago, digirati said:

other notes that don't have anything even resembling VIN

I assume you used "find in note" to see where it thought it had found a hit. I suppose it is possible that it is searching html that is not visible.

[eric99 1,033]

6 hours ago, gazumped said:

Try including a trailing space - "VIN " or specifically include hits you don't want to see by "-" as in "VIN " -vinfast

yeah, this works with just a leading and/or trailing space in the search string (without enclosing double quotes)

[Mike P 2,821]

35 minutes ago, eric99 said:

yeah, this works with just a leading and/or trailing space in the search string (without enclosing double quotes)

Not for me. The spaces are automatically removed when I press enter.

[digirati 0]

7 hours ago, gazumped said:

Try including a trailing space - "VIN " or specifically include hits you don't want to see by "-" as in "VIN " -vinfast

Thanks, gazumped, the trailing space (with or without the "") didn't work but filtering out results by using the - switch does work for me. What's really weird is that some of the search results don't have anything even remotely related to the search string.

Evernote keeps piling on the new features that very few people want but doesn't support the most basic of string searches. WTF? 🤷

[gazumped 11,830]

3 minutes ago, digirati said:

Evernote keeps piling on the new features that very few people want

They've also managed to speed up... everything,  update the backend processing and introduce some long-requested features like collapsible sections;  plus I don't think they have "how can we annoy our users" meetings to come up with new ideas.  There's a lot of support for most of them.  Not everyone wants the same things,  of course - hence the frequent posts here about hiding options that users don't need.  But I'm pretty sure that Evernote wouldn't spend time,  effort and cash on adding things like Tasks and Calendar if here weren't some demand from some customers.

As to notes that don't contain the search string - I find that images can generate false positives because text (or even random lines) has been OCR'd to 'maybe' contain the search terms,  and as @Mike P said earlier,  clips (or any HTML content) can contain hidden  text codes that search may trigger on.

If I have any difficulty with a search - lots of false positives forinstance - I'll add a tag to the correct hits containing the term I searched for,  so next time I'm guaranteed to get a quick and complete result.

[idoc 405]

5 hours ago, eric99 said:

yeah, this works with just a leading and/or trailing space in the search string (without enclosing double quotes)

Could you explain further? What does the trailing space do? Also, what is the advantage of enclosing the VIN in quotations? When I use the trailing space my search result gives me all titles that have a space. 
 

2023 non-cash

[eric99 1,033]

15 minutes ago, idoc said:

Could you explain further? What does the trailing space do? Also, what is the advantage of enclosing the VIN in quotations? When I use the trailing space my search result gives me all titles that have a space. 
 

2023 non-cash

Sorry, I thought we were discussing search in a note but this topic is about database search which has different syntax and or behavior.

So, for the database search, enclosing double quotes are required if you would like to search for string with a trailing space, otherwise it will remove the space from your search string (as Mike already mentioned)