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Search issue in Mac Client - Partial words not matched if they aren't the beginning of a word


L. Brucker

Idea

I've noticed a fairly annoying issue with the mac client.  Searches inside of the mac client do not reveal results unless they are an exact match from the beginning of a word's characters.  For example. 

 

 

In Evernote I have a note called "PoolSAS"

 

In the Evernote for Mac Client I search "SAS" and get zero results. if I search Pool, I get the result.  Pool isn't the full name any more than SAS is, the problem is that its both inconsistent and obnoxious.

 

Spotlight search reveals the note, and iOS clients find it. 

 

Same issue happens with ClientNames if I forget the space

 

Note called StacyGordon will not turn up in a search for "Gordon". neither will "tacy" but of course "Stac" will work.

 

 

I consider this a pretty annoying flaw.  

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5 replies to this idea

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I've noticed a fairly annoying issue with the mac client.  Searches inside of the mac client do not reveal results unless they are an exact match from the beginning of a word's characters.  For example. 

 

 

In Evernote I have a note called "PoolSAS"

 

In the Evernote for Mac Client I search "SAS" and get zero results. if I search Pool, I get the result.  Pool isn't the full name any more than SAS is, the problem is that its both inconsistent and obnoxious.

 

Spotlight search reveals the note, and iOS clients find it. 

 

Same issue happens with ClientNames if I forget the space

 

Note called StacyGordon will not turn up in a search for "Gordon". neither will "tacy" but of course "Stac" will work.

 

 

I consider this a pretty annoying flaw.

 

 

Evernote does not search for arbitrary sequences.  Evernote searches for beginnings of a word.  A word is defined as sequential letters, numbers & the underscore.  Everything else is a delimiter.

 

Correct. You can search for complete words and phrases, or search for prefix substrings at the start of words, but not for arbitrary character sequences in the middle of words or punctuation. We aren't currently planning to change this behavior.

Most of our search operations support prefix matching (with a wildcard at the end), but we don't support searching for matches in the middle or end of a term for performance/scalability reasons. I.e. it's very hard to make that fast once you have gigabytes of notes.

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I support the initial OP's post, I find this annoying as well. It's not hard to search for substrings inside a string ; (maybe you do have some trouble as it's not plain text every time, but you already do this for whole words) ; Chrome does this, I would expect Evernote to do it too.

 

Edit: my request refers to the contents inside a _single_ note, not to search for substrings through all notes. This should be very time efficient to do, as they are short.

Edit2: I used mac client for searching inside a note, but the web client has same behaviour (sure, web version is not an issue, I can use browser search). I now checked the Android version and I can only search through multiple notes, not a single one's content.

 

Andrei

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I support the initial OP's post, I find this annoying as well. It's not hard to search for substrings inside a string ; (maybe you do have some trouble as it's not plain text every time, but you already do this for whole words) ; Chrome does this, I would expect Evernote to do it too.

 

Edit: my request refers to the contents inside a _single_ note, not to search for substrings through all notes. This should be very time efficient to do, as they are short.

Edit2: I used mac client for searching inside a note, but the web client has same behaviour (sure, web version is not an issue, I can use browser search). I now checked the Android version and I can only search through multiple notes, not a single one's content.

 

Andrei

I'm not "not supporting" OP's request. I'm simply stating what Evernote does & posting Evernote's stance on why they do it the way they do it.

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Sorry, I didn't want to criticise this in any way. I simply want to "+1" on the smaller feature request (which is totally doable and easy) that the search in Mac's application inside a note also searches for substrings. This does not take into account the gigs of data of notes so no real efficiency required.

 

Edit: I may be wrong in requesting a feature here, not sure about that.

 

Andrei

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@Andrei:  There is no special place to post feature requests for Evernote.

 

However, IMO, a request is best made (to get Evernote's attention) by starting a new thread with a Title prefixed with "REQUEST:".

 

​While it is often posted that Evernote employees read all posts, I don't know how anyone could know this for sure.  But we can hope.   ;) 

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