Wrong search results (still)

[cjdeheer 20]

I've experienced wrong search results for the entire time I've used evernote (a number of years). In the past, the desktop results were often less complete than web search results for the same term. Evernote was never able to provide a solution for my case, and there were others in these forums who had the same experience. Deleting and recreating my local Evernote db didn't fix it.

 

I just tried a search on my desktop client, which returned 841 notes. The same search on the web client returns 1028 notes. On another search, the desktop had 14 notes and the web client had 13. (Note that for one search, the web client was more complete, while for the other search the desktop client was more complete.)

 

What good is it to keep all your important documents in Evernote if you can't rely on the search function? At tax time, when I search "tag:tax tag:2013", I'm not looking for a sampling of my tax documents. I need to be certain I'm finding *all* of them.

[gazumped 11,664]

If you have specific details of search problems it will be helpful to everyone if you report them to Evernote via the usual routes.  Differences between clients will only be resolved if Evernote have enough data to identify the reason for the anomalies.  I agree identical results is to be desired,  but I can appreciate how difficult it might be to engineer that successfully when indexes are being searched in different OS's by different processes on systems of wildly different capacity.

[cjdeheer 20]

Yes, I did report it to support. They didn't acknowledge there's a bigger problem, but they gave me a procedure to follow to recreate any affected notes. But that doesn't do me any good, since I have no way to find out which notes aren't properly indexed, and on which platform. Not to mention that I have over 10,000 notes. And in 2 minutes I was able to randomly identify a few hundred affected notes.

 

To me, proper indexing of the notes isn't just something to be desired -- it's the whole point of Evernote. When I search for my tax documents, I'm not looking for a random sampling of them (I keep using that example because that's how I first found out about the shortcomings of Evernote's search results a few years ago). I've been reporting these kinds of issues to Evernote for literally years. If they can't reliably index notes consistently across multiple platforms, then their core value proposition can't be relied on.

 

The reasons I'm posting here in addition to my support ticket are (1) to alert others that their search results may not be reliable, and (2) to put public pressure on Evernote to address an ongoing issue that undermines their product's core value proposition. Believe me, I love Evernote (based on the discussions I'm seeing in this forum, I must be one of the few people who thinks the latest redesign is *awesome*) and I *want* Evernote to work. I rely heavily on it. Which is what makes this issue so vexing.

[BurgersNFries 2,407]

I've experienced wrong search results for the entire time I've used evernote (a number of years). In the past, the desktop results were often less complete than web search results for the same term. Evernote was never able to provide a solution for my case, and there were others in these forums who had the same experience. Deleting and recreating my local Evernote db didn't fix it.

 

I just tried a search on my desktop client, which returned 841 notes. The same search on the web client returns 1028 notes. On another search, the desktop had 14 notes and the web client had 13. (Note that for one search, the web client was more complete, while for the other search the desktop client was more complete.)

 

What good is it to keep all your important documents in Evernote if you can't rely on the search function? At tax time, when I search "tag:tax tag:2013", I'm not looking for a sampling of my tax documents. I need to be certain I'm finding *all* of them.

 

It is a known issue (and has been for quite some time) that the search results vary between clients.  It does not seem to be a high priority with Evernote.  It's one of the reasons I'm migrating away from Evernote.  Around July, I submitted ticket # 627563 on this issue.

 

https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/63195-exact-string-search-trouble/