(Archived) Searching for text produces inconsistent results

[christianboyce 3]

Howdy... I have three Macs, each on Evernote 2.2.3. One of the Macs is on OS X Lion 10.7.1. The others are on 10.6.8. All three machines are signed into my Evernote Premium account with the same user name and password.

When I search Evernote for "morgan" (trying to find financial reports from Morgan Stanley) I find 11 notes on one machine, 14 on another, 15 on the third, and 48 through the web interface. I think the web interface has the best chance of being "the truth" so I am inclined to believe that I really do have 48 notes with "morgan" in them.

My iPad shows 48 notes when I search for "morgan" so I think I am on the right track here. My iPhone similarly shows 48.

So... how do I get my Macs to show 48 notes when I search for "morgan"? It sounds like a delete-and-download kind of operation but I'm not sure what to delete. Also, I wonder what happened. Sort of odd that with three Macs not one finds all of the "morgan" notes. Is this a common problem on the Mac?

Thanks for your help on this, fellow users...

[Metrodon 2,184]

I think your best bet is probably to open a support case.

[christianboyce 3]

Thanks Metrodon. Unfortunately, I had trouble getting advice from the official support channel. It was rather disappointing. I submitted the original request a week ago, got their "thank you for submitting a ticket" email, then I added information to my original request. I got a canned response about what can and can't be OCR'd by Evernote's servers, interesting stuff and related to my question but not really addressing it. Then I followed up three times, with no reply. Today I got an email from Evernote saying "it's been a week since your submisssion, so we're closing the ticket." Yay.

So I'm here asking my fellow users for their input. However, before I did that I did resubmit the ticket.

[Metrodon 2,184]

Post your ticket number and I'll see if I can get some more sensible help for you.

[christianboyce 3]

Here is my original ticket number: 16051-12261

In that ticket, I was asking about not being able to find notes that I knew were in my Evernote collection. I had done some research: I found that if I re-imported the same note again, Evernote correctly OCR'd it and that copy of the note would be found. (This was easy to do because I had kept the scan, and its name is a time/date stamp and easy to locate in the Finder.) Since then, I came to realize that Evernote probably OCR'd the original scan perfectly too, as I can find it in the web version and on my iPhone and iPad. It now seems that the problem is NOT in the OCR-ing, but in the software on my Macs. All three of them have issues while the web and iPad and iPhone handle the search just fine.

So now, instead of asking for Evernote to re-OCR the documents, I'm asking how to rebuild the Evernote database on my three Macs. Database seems fine on the web so I think the problem is "down here" and not "up there."

Thanks for your help. Funny way to get in touch with Tech Support, but I'll not turn down help!

[Metrodon 2,184]

Well the easiest thing to do might be to just clean up the data on your macs.

Have you ever deleted your data and re-sync'd?

[christianboyce 3]

Cleaning up the data on my Macs is exactly what I want to do. As I said in my original post, I don't know what to delete. I am also curious about having this same problem on 3 separate Macs. Any pointers you can give would be great. Thanks.

[Metrodon 2,184]

OK, make sure you are all sync'd up and that you have exported any local notebooks.

Then delete the evernote folder in user/library/application support.

Then sync and you should download everything fresh - hopefully it will fix you up and then you can do the same thing on your other machines.

[christianboyce 3]

I will try that. Thank you very much.

Why couldn't someone from Technical Support offer the suggestion you made? I am not pleased with the level of service provided by them. I am in a position to recommend Evernote to many people but customer support is crucial. As it is, I am hesitant to make the recommendations.

[nova47 60]

Why couldn't someone from Technical Support offer the suggestion you made? I am not pleased with the level of service provided by them.

Yeah, pretty common complaint. Right or wrong you are often better off posting your issue here first. That way you avoid the obligatory canned responses from support that eat up 36 hours, another 24 hours ensuring they understand the real issue, then the carpet bombing, clear cut logging approach of "delete, reinstall" etc. rather than a more specific fix.

For example. Here's a post I made that details how to deal with a specific issue:

viewtopic.php?f=45&t=29081#p123972

Sadly, experienced and articulate users often report that support doesn't understand their issue for the first several back and forths. Frequently it's almost comical. In the above instance I ended up designing the fix on my own. Oh how I long for the old days when support was a couple of people who lived on a boat (seriously).

[Metrodon 2,184]

I will try that. Thank you very much.

Why couldn't someone from Technical Support offer the suggestion you made? I am not pleased with the level of service provided by them. I am in a position to recommend Evernote to many people but customer support is crucial. As it is, I am hesitant to make the recommendations.

Well, let's see if it works first......

I see lots of people who want to recommend Evernote particularly for commercial use. Don't get me wrong, I use it for work and I even share a notebook or two with colleagues - but I wouldn't depend it.

Evernote by their own admission are not trying to be an Enterprise app, so they don't support many features that a business would want and their support is I think consumer class. I know they are trying to improve and to a certain extent they are victims of their own success, having to hire very quickly to keep up with demand.

[christianboyce 3]

Well, it looks as if removing the Evernote folder from Application Support, and letting it rebuild (which took hours) worked perfectly. Thank you so much. I have finished two of the machines and am now working on the third.

[Metrodon 2,184]

No problem, glad it worked.

I'm not sure where the problem lies, but there are clearly occasions where the local database gets out of sync with what is in the cloud. Actually, I'm not even sure it's the database - more likely it's the Index.