(Archived) Search in Evernote

[todd1611 2]

Hi, I'm new to Evernote. I have saved a number of notes using the following format: 2011_10_29_this_is_my_saved_note.pdf. When I search for the word "this" (for example), I don't get any results. So it's not searching the title of the saved note. I figure I must be doing something wrong. Can anyone help me to search the titles of my saved notes? Thank you.

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

Evernote does not search for arbitrary character sequences in notes. A "word" consists of letters, numbers & the underscore. So your title of 2011_10_29_this_is_my_saved_note is considered one word. If you had named your file 20111029 this is my saved note.pdf & then added it to Evernote, the title would then be defaulted to the name of the file. Then you could do ta search on the lines of this;

intitle:20111029

And you would find your note. You could narrow your search like this:

intitle:20111029 my note

which searches for all notes with 20111029 in the title and contains the words "my" and "note" in either the title or the body of the note.

[todd1611 2]

Okay that answers my question. So do you consider an effective title to be "2011 10 29 this is my note"? Also, i did a search for a word that was in the document (is this feature only possible with OCR turned on?). It found a document with that word, but it did not highlight it. Do I need to turn on highlighting? Thank you! Todd

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

hi todd. i don't see any point in having the spaces. as i mentioned in your other thread, 111029 is perfectly sufficient. fewer characters to type, and it is distinguished from any instances of 2011, 10, or 29. because pretty much all of the notes i make follow this format (there are exceptions related to my field of research), i can type in a date in this format for any period over the last few years and immediately find notes, pdfs, receipts, etc. generated that day. i think it is a handy way of labeling.

as for the rest of your title, i would recommend limiting it to key words. we already know "this", we don't need the verb "is", everything is a "note" and it is all "saved"

instead, perhaps "111029 journal project x". pull out keywords from your note to create the title. the title is really there to help you comb through your notes more quickly (although, there are ways to focus searches on titles if you choose).

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

do you consider an effective title to be "2011 10 29 this is my note"? Todd

I agree with GM on the date issue. Please read this post.

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

do you consider an effective title to be "2011 10 29 this is my note"? Todd

I agree with GM on the date issue. Please read this post.

That's a good thread. Something I would add is that iOS displays things differently and stuff like nested notebooks aren't shown inside their parent notebooks, so the notebooks can be unwieldy. My aversion to notebooks probably has something to do with the fact that I do most of my work on the iPad and/or iPod.

My aversion to long titles has a longer history (hahaha), but the fact that the full titles don't always display on different platforms makes the process I mentioned (going from big category to small--"111029 work project X facebook enemies") particularly useful (in my opinion).

Anyhow, start dumping stuff into Evernote, play around with it, and you'll have a much better handle on things. I think Evernote is unique in that it kind of rewards the disorganized (who just follow a few simple rules without creating making a time-consuming organizational scheme) and penalizes the organized (who begin by setting up massive folder tree schemes to organize their entire lives).

[Tony Christopher 0]

I was not aware of the 'intitle' feature for search, that will be helpful. Has EN considered relevance ranking search results? Seems weird to me that when I search on a word that is in a note's title that the search results do not give those notes priority. Similarly for when my search term = a tag assigned to a note. It would be very very helpful to those of us with lots and lots of notes to see search results ranked ... logic for ranking might be:

1. Notes for which search term = a tag assigned to the note AND is contained in note title

2. Notes for which search term is contained in note title OR Notes for which search term is contained in a tag assigned to note

3. Notes with none of the above but which contain search term in body of note

[jefito 5,589]

They have no "relevance" metric; notes are sorted purely by field (whatever's the criterion for the view you're in at the time). So to fit in with existing behavior, there would need to be a dynamically generated field for each note, denoting relevance to the current search. Note that searches are not always for text (e.g., date, content, geolocation, etc), so those would need to be factored into any relevance rating as well.