(Archived) substring searching?

[__Tango 0]

Hi folks.

Loving evernote for the couple of weeks that I've been using it.

The one thing that gets me is the searching. in particular, i simply want to find all of my notes that have a substring of a string anwhere within them. For example, if i have a document that has the word "foobar", it seems i cannot search for "bar" and have the search turn up the note that has "foobar" in it.

Another sample i have is that i have many notes that contain urls "http://www.foobar.com/foo/bar/ack". I want to do a search for "foobar", and have the search turn up the note that has "http://www.foobar.com..."

there seems to be odd requirements for quotes, parentheses, etc. But i'm not sure how they're supposed to work.

Thanks.

...alex...

[engberg 89]

Which client interface are you using? The search engines are different on each client, so we're working through minor differences in search behavior.

Thanks

[__Tango 0]

Which client interface are you using? The search engines are different on each client, so we're working through minor differences in search behavior.

Both the mac and web interface.

Thanks!

[engberg 89]

If I paste this into a note:

http://www.foobar.com/foo/bar/ack

I can search for this on the web using either "foobar" or "bar"

The Mac client has a bug related to words that are immediately preceded by punctuation, however. We're looking into this.

Thanks for the report

[__Tango 0]

If I paste this into a note:

http://www.foobar.com/foo/bar/ack

I can search for this on the web using either "foobar" or "bar"

Whoops, i shouldn't have used "bar" twice (once in the hostname, and once in the path).

Try this:

http://www.foobar.com/a/b/c

Now search for "bar". Neither the mac client nor the web client will pull up the page.

Unfortunately, this is a pretty serious issue for me.

The Mac client has a bug related to words that are immediately preceded by punctuation, however. We're looking into this.

Great, hope this gets fixed soon! Keep up the good work.

Thanks.

...alex...

[engberg 89]

Evernote's search platform looks for "words" and "phrases", not arbitrary sequences of characters within your note. This provides fast, indexed search across large numbers of notes without all the false positives you'd get from character-by-character matching.

[drmrbrewer 11]

Hmm, so that's it? It's out of the question, both now and ever? Seems like a big limitation. I also had a thread going on this issue (viewtopic.php?f=30&t=12023) and note in that thread that it would be very useful to be able to match a string anywhere. Even if not in a super-fast indexed way... slow will do for me on the odd occasion I really need it. Unless I'm mistaken, though, doesn't google find substrings (in an instant)?

Mike

[catrien 0]

I have the same problem. I entered this as a test: "heart's desires". If I search for "desires", I get the note. If I search for "desire", I don't. Can this be fixed?

Thanks a lot!

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

I have the same problem. I entered this as a test: "heart's desires". If I search for "desires", I get the note. If I search for "desire", I don't.

Works for me. So does using 'pray' to find a note with the word 'prayer'.

[catrien 0]

Are you on Mac OS? I am. (But why would that make a difference with the web version?)

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

I'm using the Windows client and the iPhone client. So I tried it on the web version. It behaves differently...??? If I search for 'pray', the note is not found, even though the search criteria (in the blue ribbon at the top) shows 'pray*' OTOH, if I enter 'pray*' as my search term, the search criteria now shows 'pray**' and it does find the notes... It seems like this is a bug in the web search.

[catrien 0]

So maybe they'll fix it...

[engberg 89]

That's a bug on the web. Thanks for the report.

[catrien 0]

Only used it one day and I'm already famous.

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

Only used it one day and I'm already famous.

That & $2 will get you a cup of coffee.

[catrien 0]

8)

Looks like it's fixed; great.