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How to search in all notes on the iPhone?


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I am new to Evernote and I am trying to understand the limits and capabilities of the different clients (ie iPhone, iPad, Mac, Windows.) I have the premium version and I need to do a search from the home screen of the iPhone app that will search inside all notes(not titles). Is this possible?

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An "intitle:<search term>" search will search only the titles.  A normal search will include the contents of any notes plus text, and JPG attachments and (for premium subscribers) PDF and Office documents too.  Your phone will have a search index to work from,  but if you have no network connection,  won't be able to download the full note contents unless you have specified that one or more notebooks should be "offline searchable".  Notes are not normally saved to local storage on mobile devices because of their limited capacity.

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I am new to Evernote and I am trying to understand the limits and capabilities of the different clients (ie iPhone, iPad, Mac, Windows.) I have the premium version and I need to do a search from the home screen of the iPhone app that will search inside all notes(not titles). Is this possible?

 

Unfortunately there is no way to search ONLY Note contents.  

 

Text entered into the Search box without any qualifier will search Note Contents, Title, and Tags that have words starting with the text.  If you wish to exclude Notes that have certain words in their Title, you can enter -intitle:<word>, where <word> is the word you want to exclude.  The key is using the minus symbol.

 

For example:

evernote -intitle:evernote

 

would return all Notes that have words starting with "evernote" in the Note Contents or Tag, BUT do NOT have the word "evernote" in the Title.

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A normal search will include the contents of any notes plus text...

Yes, I am trying to do a normal search on an ios8 iPhone where I know the content of some notes include, for example, "horses". When I do a normal search for "horses", no notes come up that I know include it. I always have an Internet connection so I'm just wondering if this is a bug or lack of functionality for the iPhone app.

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Can you just go to one of the notes that contains horses on your phone?  If you can any chance of special characters preceding the h?  As a test create a new note with horses in the body of the note and see if it can be found.

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I just did a test which confirms what you are seeing.  Search does not seem to generate results from the body of notebooks on my iPhone with aren't classified as "offline", meaning stored on the phone.  If the notebook is classified as offline the body of the note is searched.  At least in a couple of quick searches.

 

I don't know if this is planned behavior or a bug.   But I am seeing what you are seeing.  Sorry for my density on this one, the bulk of my notebooks are classified as offline so I hadn't ever bumped into this.  FWIW.

 

Edit:  Weirdness, search seems not to work on text in not offline notebooks, double negative ouch.  However, search does work on on PDFs in not offline notebooks. 

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That's what I see relative to offline notebooks.  It might be worth a bug report since it makes no sense that the PDF would be searchable and the text wouldn't in a not offline notebook.  To me anyway.  I'm assuming if you search for horses on the web version you get all of the notes you expect?

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Windows and Mac desktop clients work fine as does the web apps for IE, Safari, and Chrome.

Searching for default note content on the iPhone and iPad doesn't work at the moment.

That's too bad because at my job they only have IE 8 or 9 (can't remember) so I cant even open the web app and I can't use a mobile device to search like I need.

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I just did a test which confirms what you are seeing.  Search does not seem to generate results from the body of notebooks on my iPhone with aren't classified as "offline", meaning stored on the phone.  If the notebook is classified as offline the body of the note is searched.  At least in a couple of quick searches.

 

I don't know if this is planned behavior or a bug.   

 

I'm pretty sure it is a bug.  I've been using EN iOS for years and EN Search previously worked fine, finding words in the body that were not in the Title for normal (not offline) Notebooks.  I've certainly never seen any Evernote documentation, posts, or blogs that stated the Note had to be in Offline Notebooks in order to search the Note body.

 

I just ran a test on EN iPhone 7.6.4 on my iPhone 6+ running iOS 8.1 and the search worked fine with normal Notebooks.

For normal Notebooks, Evernote would have to search the Evernote Cloud.  I am on a wi-fi connection.  I don't know if that makes any difference, but it might.

 

So, I'm not sure what is the difference in the iPhone setup between my iPhone  and you guys that would cause the Search differences.

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I just did a test which confirms what you are seeing.  Search does not seem to generate results from the body of notebooks on my iPhone with aren't classified as "offline", meaning stored on the phone.  If the notebook is classified as offline the body of the note is searched.  At least in a couple of quick searches.

 

I don't know if this is planned behavior or a bug.   

 

I'm pretty sure it is a bug.  I've been using EN iOS for years and EN Search previously worked fine, finding words in the body that were not in the Title for normal (not offline) Notebooks. ...

 

You are correct. Searching in Notebooks works fine. My issue is that I can't search (all notes) from the home screen on the iphone app. Many times I'm searching for things that are in multiple notebooks and I don't know which one to search in particular. This kind of search would be especially useful when on the go with the mobile app. The desktop clients and web apps perform this action flawlessly, but I have not seen any successful home screen searches on the iphone and ipad apps.

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I think it is a bug as well. I have a good wifi connection and text in not offline notebooks does not seem to be searchable from the home screen or from a notebook screen for that matter. But again, very weird that PDFs in such notes are searchable but the text is not.

Perhaps the target notes I am using are hosed and need to be fixed, but I'm doubting it.

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You are correct. Searching in Notebooks works fine. My issue is that I can't search (all notes) from the home screen on the iphone app. Many times I'm searching for things that are in multiple notebooks and I don't know which one to search in particular. This kind of search would be especially useful when on the go with the mobile app. The desktop clients and web apps perform this action flawlessly, but I have not seen any successful home screen searches on the iphone and ipad apps.

 

 

 

 

 

Hi,

 

I'm sorry to hear you're having an issue with search.

 

Aside from this thread, I haven't heard of any issues with searching across all notes while not offline, so I'm wondering if you could provide more information about the steps your taking while doing a search. This will help us understand if there is a bug in the app or perhaps a usability issue that we should look into.

 

From the home screen, if you tap on the search icon and start typing you should see suggestions for notes, notebooks, and tags auto-populate below as you type. These are not the full results from search. After typing your search term and tapping the blue "Search" button, you should see your full search result set.

 

Thanks!

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Weird.  The issue I reported above is gone.  Doing the same search as before I now find the note in the not offline notebook.  So no problems here.

 

EDIT:  Cockpit error I am thinking....

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You are correct. Searching in Notebooks works fine. My issue is that I can't search (all notes) from the home screen on the iphone app. Many times I'm searching for things that are in multiple notebooks and I don't know which one to search in particular. This kind of search would be especially useful when on the go with the mobile app. The desktop clients and web apps perform this action flawlessly, but I have not seen any successful home screen searches on the iphone and ipad apps.

 

 

 

 

 

From the home screen, if you tap on the search icon and start typing you should see suggestions for notes, notebooks, and tags auto-populate below as you type. These are not the full results from search. After typing your search term and tapping the blue "Search" button, you should see your full search result set.

 

 

 

Ok, thanks for clearing that up! I must have been used to the functionality of the desktop clients for Windows and Mac where if you start typing in a word, the notes that contain that word pop up in the left pane. There is no need to push the search button on those clients. But on the ipad, and iphone clients when you start typing a word in the search "all notes", only the note titles that contain the search word pop up (along with the tags and notebooks). This is where my confusion began..... to be honest, I never used the web client much because I have the desktop clients at home and an outdated IE browser at work. I did test the web client this evening which confirmed that you have to press the search button to get any results.

 

Again, thanks for helping me differentiate between the search functionalities of the desktop, web, and IOS clients.

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