Is it possible to prevent searching in Shared Notebooks

[SteveJam 7]

Folks,

Have multiple shared notebooks with confidential health info from friends. Have tried every option but cannot prevent Edit > Find > Search Notes from searching all my personal data as well as the data from friends. Am am in no way interested in search results from these shared notebooks - unless I specifically want to.

I have found this behaviour so annoying that I have simply unshared these notebooks, which I don't really want.

So, is there any way to perform a search without the shared data showing up?

Any suggestions/comments most appreciated.

Steve J

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

Hi. I do not know of a way to filter it, and like you, I left all of my joined notebooks (in part) because of this problem.The Windows client, as far as I can tell, does allow you to make this distinction. For this reason (and others) I primarily use Evernote with Windows (via Parallels) on my Mac. This is the best workaround I have found to deal with the differences between the clients.

[SteveJam 7]

GM, thanks for this. Had actually created a 2nd account specifically for sharing these notebooks but the invites always led to shared notebooks being linked to my primary account. Go figure!

Oh well, off to put in a feature request. Thx for the info.

Steve J

[jefito 5,589]

This feature has already been requested in the Windows beta threads (by me).

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

This feature has already been requested in the Windows beta threads (by me).

I think the issue here is that you "can" filter the results depending on which button you press in Windows, but on the Mac we cannot even press buttons to filter out the results. They are always there, and with dozens of notebooks totaling thousands of notes, it becomes a hopeless morass of extraneous information.

Your suggestion (if I remember correctly) of the ability to designate different kinds of notebooks through the search grammar is the ideal solution. I suppose i t would be great if we could designate "business," "shared," "personal," and "joined." Now that I think about it, what if you have a search for notebook:x and you have joined notebook x, which is owned by someone else? I assume you get search results from both notebooks, and they are indistinguishable. I haven't testted this, but if true, it would be an additional reason for implementing some kind of control through the search api.

[jefito 5,589]

Um, the ability to filter search results to our own notebooks is pretty inadequate on the Windows client as well. It's not a part of the search grammar, and you can't persist it to a saved search, for example. And the UI support ain't all that great -- see my notes in the various topics. Not very useful, and should be bolstered across all clients.

I may have to try to test the notebook thingy...

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

Um, the ability to filter search results to our own notebooks is pretty inadequate on the Windows client as well. It's not a part of the search grammar, and you can't persist it to a saved search, for example. And the UI support ain't all that great -- see my notes in the various topics. Not very useful, and should be bolstered across all clients.

I may have to try to test the notebook thingy...

Inadequate and rudimentary, to be sure, but at least it exists. On the Mac, it doesn't even rise to the level of inadequate -- it doesn't exist at all

I agree (as noted above) with you about what needs to be done. As a concrete example of how problematic this can be, a few weeks ago, when we had no note counts on the Mac, I was oblivious to major search inconsistencies. When we got the counts back, I could see something wrong with different search results across clients. It wasn't until I left nearly all of my joined notebooks that the searches became somewhat consistent again, and the bugs became apparent. I think the dramatic impact something like this can have on a workflow, epecially when we are talking about differences of hundreds and even more than a thousand notes (as reported), speaks volumes about the necessity of displaying information about our account. I call this information density.

The Windows client does a pretty good job with information density (it could be better, of course!), but on Mac and iOS it is like peering through a windshield during a torrential downpour and just barely being able to make out the taillights in front of you. Everything slows to a crawl, and you lose almost all of your visibility. Combined with the inability to manage what is shown to you (no filtering of joined notebooks), it is like night and day moving from Mac to Windows. I believe the new user interfaces are designed well for some use cases, but not for mine, which involves thousands of notes, lots of text, shared notebooks, and joined ones as well.

I keep stressing this, because I don't think it has to be this way, and when you move from 10 to 10,000 notes the application has to be able to scale up better. Surely both operating systems and applications are capable of giving us fine-grain control over our external brains, but for some reason, even the option for this is seen as anathema. I urge the developers in 2013 to re-evaluate this approach and seriously consider equipping users with the tools they need to manage accounts of ever-increasing size and complexity (now we have to deal with shared, joined, and business notebooks using tools designed for just a few of your personal notes).

Making distinctions in the search grammar would be a good start!

[SteveJam 7]

GM, heartily agree with your comments. Am currently at about the 11,000-mark with my notes. Half of these being medical pdfs. Have been struggling with the choice of knowledge silo for many years now. If it weren’t for the need to have the notes synced with my office and mobile devices, I would, without hesitation, be back with DEVONThink.

EN does a phenomenal job with syncing but searching these ever more disparate and numerous notes is becoming challenging. Searching a few hundred notes is really simple, searching tens of thousands less so. If Evernote as a company is indeed a “hundred-year company”, silos with tens of thousands of notes will become commonplace.

I really struggle with searching currently. Just cannot understand why the search function has been made so opaque. Even now, 18 months after migrating from DEVONThink, I occasionally have to go back to the books to figure out certain search criteria. Ended up cobbling together a Keyboard Maestro macro which lets me input up to 6 search variables without having to type search pointers. This will generally find most things,

Sorry for wandering off-topic. I agree that EN clearly needs further refining of searching in the context of large databases and particularly in the context of shared notebooks.

Steve J

[Jackolicious 808]

This feature is coming soon.

[jefito 5,589]

This feature is coming soon.

Coming in the search grammar? Or just in the UI?

[learned 1]

I have to agree with the problem voiced on this thread. I have shared notebooks where people (Evernote Ambassadors even) have set up open todo lists. That means when I try and use Evernote to track my todos, those open items always show up. I need someway to filter them out.