(Archived) Searching Across Shared/Subscribed Notebooks

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I use Evernote to disseminate I.T. support info to clients by adding notes to a notebook that they subscribe to. It is frustrating that clients have to select whether they want to search notebooks in their own account (the Account tab) OR notebooks to which they have subscribed (the Shared tab).

There currently doesn't appear to be any way of searching across ALL notebooks they have access to. They have to do at least 2 searches to include all available data.

The 'All Notebooks' item is a misnomer - in the sense that it doesn't include Shared Notebooks.

Anyone know of a workaround?

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

This post by Heather & the link to the thread (click the icon in the upper left of the quote) should shed some light on why the shared notebooks are basically an entirely different entity from your own notebooks.

Notes in other people's notebooks have different properties. Some shared notebooks are "read only", and the set of tags in other people's accounts are different from your tags. So trying to merge them all together would lead to a lot of strange inconsistencies (e.g. related to tags and permissions).

So that addresses (albeit unsatisfactorily) read-only notebooks. What about read-write shared notebooks?

No, it's not just read-only notebooks. It's all notebooks. The properties of a notebook in *your* account are entirely different from the properties of a notebook in someone else's. Their NotebookGUID list is not the same. They don't have the same tag structure that you do.

You are allowed 250 notebooks in your account. That's it. No more. There's a notebook table that allows 250 of them. Shared notebooks do not go into that table. They're in an entirely different place. They do not cross.

Which is why we've been saying that we understand, for usability, yes, it would be cool, but from a programming perspective, it does not work.

Ok, maybe this will explain it:

You know how when you bookmark something in a web page, you get a nice little hyperlink that goes to that page, loads it in your browser, makes it look nice - and you can even do a "view offline" so you have that page available whenever you want, but you don't actually own the the actual page on your computer for other people to go to when they click it on Google? That's shared notebooks.

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Furthermore - tags don't work across the Account and Shared panes. This is becoming a deal breaker for using subscribed notebooks.

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I'm thinking in database terms whereby some data might be 'read only' and other data might be 'read/write' - but both data sets are searchable as one entity.

Yes there may well be programming issues making this difficult - but Evernote is so close to making this type of data management useful and powerful - but just failing at the last hurdle - frustrating. The interesting thing about this application is that you have two datasets - one outside an organisation (read only) - and one internal (read/write) and being able to search both as one is very interesting and useful - but at the moment client feedback is that its not viable.