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When is partial word search going to be supported?


abdu

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There are many times when I can't remember the full word I am searching. Just a part of it. I really wish Evernote supports searching for partial words, regardless of which part.

I have to export all notes and search them outside of Evernote.

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7 hours ago, rafavalor20 said:

In conclusion: it does not work properly though it's an essential functionality.

Yes, it's not a full feature search index
It is what it is; that's the way search works

To date; Evernote has given no indication they intend to change the search indexing

You are welcome to add your support to this request using the voting buttons in the upper left corner
So far, this request has 5a7d39f34b475_ScreenShot2018-02-08at22_03_30.png.64464d4b166dcaa3016c4a59e43e16b2.png votes

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14 hours ago, Dave-in-Decatur said:

It is possible to search for partial words, but only if you know the start of the word. From the article https://dev.evernote.com/doc/articles/search_grammar.php:

So if I type in "creat*" as a search term, it will find "create," "created," "creates," "creating," "creator," "creative," "creature," etc. But if I type in "*reat" it won't find anything. In fact, when I start typing, it searches for words beginning with all the characters I've typed as I type them. Putting * at the beginning of the search term is the same as putting nothing; i.e., "*rea" and "rea" will both find "real," "reality," "read," etc., but will not find "create," "treat," "breathe," etc.

Evernote needs to support searching for any text regardless if where the part resides. All text editors can do such searches. I use Evernote to recall any kind of text. So let me be able to do it!

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Aside from missing this feature, searching in EN is actually pretty good and you should hopefully not have to export your notes to search them.  Can you provide an example of this and maybe we can offer some suggestions or work arounds. 

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It is possible to search for partial words, but only if you know the start of the word. From the article https://dev.evernote.com/doc/articles/search_grammar.php:

Quote

A wildcard is only permitted at the end of the term, not at the beginning or middle for scalability reasons on the service.

So if I type in "creat*" as a search term, it will find "create," "created," "creates," "creating," "creator," "creative," "creature," etc. But if I type in "*reat" it won't find anything. In fact, when I start typing, it searches for words beginning with all the characters I've typed as I type them. Putting * at the beginning of the search term is the same as putting nothing; i.e., "*rea" and "rea" will both find "real," "reality," "read," etc., but will not find "create," "treat," "breathe," etc.

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@Dave-in-Decatur 

1 hour ago, Dave-in-Decatur said:

So if I type in "creat*" as a search term, it will find "create," "created," "creates," "creating," "creator," "creative," "creature," etc.

That is what I've noticed as well, beginning word partials seems to work AFAIK ok.  I leave off the trailing asterisk, it doesn't seem to matter.  I did some additional testing after posting the response above and interestingly if I search for some characters within a word without the asterisk it would sometimes work, but appears to be very inconsistent and incomplete.

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3 hours ago, jbenson2 said:

Finding information quickly and efficiently is one of Evernote's strengths. There are several techniques to enhance search results.-  for example:

  • detailed consistent structured titles
  • YYMMDD date prefix in title for date ranges
  • tags (lower case only, no spaces, singular - not plural)
  • intitle: search
  • key words in text
  • good understanding of Evernote's search grammar

In the example mentioned - if I realized that I could remember localdb, but not sqllocaldb, then I would add localdb as a keyword assist for future searches. I'd also add a tag.

I would be concerned with the work required to index every possible sequential group of letters in every word in my 40,000+ notes and still be searchable with my phone. I doubt partial internal character or partial number search will be supported anytime soon.

No No. This is a very poor workaround. If I am pasting a note of 500 words, I am not going to create 500 tags. Evernote should be able to search like a text editor search. Just go through all the words. Indexing is used for instant searches. Machines are very fast now. Character by character searches is a none performance issue. All text editors do it and results is almost instantaneous. I would rather wait for a couple seconds to get a result than a non searchable software.

Saved indexes and plain dumb searches can go hand on hand. They compliment each other. Not replace each other.

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16 hours ago, s2sailor said:

Aside from missing this feature, searching in EN is actually pretty good and you should hopefully not have to export your notes to search them.  Can you provide an example of this and maybe we can offer some suggestions or work arounds. 

I have a note on sqllocaldb, a computer command. I couldn't remember the command but remember localdb. Searching for localdb returned nothing.

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6 hours ago, abdu said:

I have a note on sqllocaldb, a computer command. I couldn't remember the command but remember localdb. Searching for localdb returned nothing.

 
 
 

Finding information quickly and efficiently is one of Evernote's strengths. There are several techniques to enhance search results.-  for example:

  • detailed consistent structured titles
  • YYMMDD date prefix in title for date ranges
  • tags (lower case only, no spaces, singular - not plural)
  • intitle: search
  • key words in text
  • good understanding of Evernote's search grammar

In the example mentioned - if I realized that I could remember localdb, but not sqllocaldb, then I would add localdb as a keyword assist for future searches. I'd also add a tag.

I would be concerned with the work required to index every possible sequential group of letters in every word in my 40,000+ notes and still be searchable with my phone. I doubt partial internal character or partial number search will be supported anytime soon.

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1 hour ago, jbenson2 said:

I would be concerned with the work required to index every possible sequential group of letters in every word

and the slow down in performance that would occur.  I echo this concern as well since there are already concerns with how Evernote will scale over time with increasing databases.

7 hours ago, abdu said:

I couldn't remember the command but remember localdb

Not remembering the exact words has happened to me as well and when I do eventually find the note I just add the first couple of keywords that I first tried to the title so that next time I'll find it quicker.  I could probably avoid this even more with more careful tagging but it happens so seldom and finding the forgotten note never takes that long, that, at least for me, the keyword approach is the way to go.

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26 minutes ago, abdu said:

I would rather wait for a couple seconds to get a result than a non searchable software.

Well, this request for internal partial character searches has been mentioned in this forum a few times over the past 7 years. Honestly, I think you will be waiting a long time for Evernote to re-write their multiplatform software codes for a request that does not seem to have a lot of support from the users. 

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I can certainly understand the desire for this type of searching. If it were just a matter of searching the local version of the notes database ("like a text editor"), it probably wouldn't be hard to implement. But with devices other than desktop or laptop computers, it might get more difficult. My understanding is that on smartphones, the database is not stored locally, so that searching has to be done on the Evernote servers. (Or perhaps on a locally-created index? Someone please correct my ignorance here!) I presume the "scalability reasons on the service" to which the search grammar article so cryptically refers have to do with this limitation.

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I am suggesting that we consolidate this request to get the votes up… I am suggesting mine because it already has a number of votes replies… The post is here, https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/88379-feature-request-improved-tag-functionality-for-ios/

This request keeps popping up but I believe it is getting ignored because it doesn’t get a critical mass of attention at any one moment, I’d like to see if we can get everyone on board to bring this up the list and to Evernote’s attention.

Thank you!

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8 hours ago, jbenson2 said:

Well, this request for internal partial character searches has been mentioned in this forum a few times over the past 7 years. Honestly, I think you will be waiting a long time for Evernote to re-write their multiplatform software codes for a request that does not seem to have a lot of support from the users. 

There's no need to rewrite anything. Evernote already can export all the notes into a single file.  A simple use of  like Javascript's or C#'s indexOf string function can find any character or string in any text collection. Really.. it's not hard. I am a software developer. 

Evernote is about saving and syncing notes across devices. Searching and retrieving notes should be very flexible.

I won't wait for anyone. I will just export into a single file or files into an empty folder and search manually.

Most people don't have gigabytes and terabytes of notes for Evernote to depend on indexing only.

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17 hours ago, Yipeedog said:

I believe it is getting ignored because it doesn’t get a critical mass of attention

I think you are correct. The majority of Evernote users don't have a recurring need to search for an internal partial character stream.

Also, the variety of requests on the post you mentioned don't relate to this OP's request.

EDIT: I see that you are using the same request on the last dozen of your posts. SPAM is not permitted. I will report this.

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4 hours ago, jbenson2 said:

EDIT: I see that you are using the same request on the last dozen of your posts. SPAM is not permitted. I will report this.

Yeah, that's useful... You've got a weird functionality gap (multi tag search, not any partial character string), that used to be available, is still available on some versions of the system, users are confused and repeatedly wondering why this is or when it might be remedied, then I come along proposing that it is because of the numerous disconnected feature requests not getting enough traction, I post to a variety of threads asking people to hop on board one particular request so that it can gain some momentum... and you are going to report me for spamming?

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Ugh, this is so frustrating. Just noticed after 1 year of using EN with over 1000 notes that this is not possible. I just assumed it would be. Stupid me huh?

And no, being "optimized" (whatever that means) for speed is not a good argument. As others have mentioned, it's fine if I have to wait a couple of moments if I do a demanding query, but it's not fine if EN cannot do what a text editor or a simple python script could do, and what I have come to just expect from computers. Now I feel like my data ist locked in.

Also, it could be an option to have this 1) only on desktop and/or web and 2) only for the text content or even only for titles (I just hit it when trying to do an "intitle:" query). That should be fast enough!

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Also agree. I always preach the benefits and power of the Evernote search engine among my clients and discover this has been surprising.
That's how I found this lack:
I was searching for a car plate license (8827HCB). I did not remember the first numbers, but was sure about the letters, so I looked for HCB with no results. I was sure of having that particular note inside my database!!

When at the end I found the note... nothing special suggested me something was bad written or misspelled... No no... Just searching 882 it works, but HCB not.

For my total bewilderment, then I did another test. I searched for len and got many notes that contained words like AllenLength or pollen ...
All the notes involved (including the license plate of the car) have been in my database for years and I do not see any apparent technical or syntactic difference in them.
I explained the case to Evernote support but they sent me to the well-known advanced syntax page.

Moreover. The program does not cheat you because in the search results a legend stays that results... "contain words starting with:". (look the attachment). Starting. Not containing.

In conclusion: it does not work properly though it's an essential functionality.

Please, Evernote engineers...

 

Evernote bad search.jpg

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38 minutes ago, DTLow said:

Yes, it's not a full feature sort index
It is what it is; that's the way sort works

 

I don't know what sort index is exactly. Evernote needs to find EVERYTHING. Just like any decent text editor does. Give me the option to do a text search without using any indexes. Just go through ALL the text. I don't care how slow it will be. I would rather wait 3 more seconds than not finding what I want. I don't have hundreds of thousands of notes where I am going to worry about performance and even then I would rather wait. Computers are very fast these days. People want to find notes. Let me worry about performance, not Evernote.

 

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If I know for sure that the note exists and I can't find it because Evernote's search is unable to find it, is exporting all the notes to HTML format and search that file using a text editor.

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7 hours ago, abdu said:

Evernote needs to find EVERYTHING. Just like any decent text editor does.

I intended my post to refer to the search index that is built and used by Evernote. 

I support the request, and have added my vote.  I'm trying to solicit more votes.  
We're up to 5a7db01c674f1_ScreenShot2018-02-09at06_28_14.png.a87a23f560650a3325faf9858d6d63e4.png  votes now

7 hours ago, abdu said:

If I know for sure that the note exists and I can't find it because Evernote's search is unable to find it, is exporting all the notes to HTML format and search that file using a text editor.

I actually maintain an html copy as part of my backups; yes, it is also useful for searches using the OS search feature (Mac)

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Call me crazy, but I find that perhaps the most important thing that a note-taking app can do is provide the ability search those notes. Not the search speed. The lack of partial search means, that Evernote is useless for technical notes.

 

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strongly suspect there are many, many, more none-technical people who could use this feature, but either don't know the correct technical jargon required to find the forum post, or simply don't realize it's a feature they could ask for.  Most of my technically... let's say "inexperienced", older coworkers and many other professionals I know don't even realize that poor search performance is a design decision rather than just evernote "not working that way".  
 

That said, my workaround has always been to make notes with multiple identifying words at the top (not tags, just like a brief summary at the top).  Sometimes when I forget one word I can find the note in question by searching for related terms and sorting through the hopefully brief list of results.

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The frustrating thing about this is that partial word search already exists within Evernote, but it only works for search within note (Ctrl-F).  They simply need to allow this pre-existing search engine (or whatever programmers call it) to search the entire database. 

Or am I barking up the wrong tree? 

In regards to what someone else mentioned, I think it is not necessary to have this capability on all platforms, Windows/Mac should be more than enough, besides we are all used to crippled versions of Evernote on our portable devices. 🙄

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Tried OneNote, but just found out that OneNote doesn't support wildcard at the beginning either.

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/onenotetips/2010/11/16/searching-for-notes-in-onenote/

This issue is quite frustrating because after using Evernote for ten years, there are just too many notes to search.

I simply don't get the idea of how hard to scale on my local machine to support full-text searching.

 

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17 hours ago, fengkan said:

I simply don't get the idea of how hard to scale on my local machine to support full-text searching.

As I understand it, the standard search grammar (the one that allows for tag, notebook, reminder, etc. as well as literal text) runs its text search against an index that's created specifically for matching word prefixes in all of your notes. This makes search a lot faster, but doesn't really scale to infix searches. 

That being said, it would be nice to have the ability to override that behavior in the search language (example: the presence of a leading '*' in the text string would be an easy case, since '*''s aren't matched literally), and let the user take the time penalty. For large note databases, that would be a lot slower., since they have to access the text for each note, rather than the pre-built indexes. Searching individual notes in parallel would probably help some with that.

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Yes we need something like that. I would rather wait a couple seconds for such a search to complete. I am not sure how many notes and note size a typical user has for Evenote to make a decision that only an index search should be implemented otherwise it would be very slow. Some of us use SSDs and lots of memory. I don't like software which doesn't take advantage of users' hardware capabilities. A one second index search vs a 3 second scan search which gets me all the results. I would take the 3 second search any day. It's not like I am doing a search tens of times every day.

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1 hour ago, abdu said:

I would rather wait a couple seconds for such a search to complete.

To get a more realistic sense of how long it would take, have a large number of files of different types spread through multiple Windows folders (text, office, pdf, zip, etc), then disable Windows indexing service, then try a word search inside of files across subfolders. 

It may take between 3 to 15 minutes (maybe a little less with SSD), acceptable for occasional searches, painful for daily use (based on actual experience when I discovered Windows indexing was disabled).

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4 hours ago, Don Dz said:

To get a more realistic sense of how long it would take, have a large number of files of different types spread through multiple Windows folders (text, office, pdf, zip, etc), then disable Windows indexing service, then try a word search inside of files across subfolders. 

It may take between 3 to 15 minutes (maybe a little less with SSD), acceptable for occasional searches, painful for daily use (based on actual experience when I discovered Windows indexing was disabled).

3-15 minutes is absolutely ridiculous. I use a tool called File Locator Pro and I just used it now. It searched 44,284 files, in maybe a few hundred folders (6.36GB total size) and it came back with results in 3 seconds.  That's pure sequential scanning throughout all the files. No indexes used. It includes all partial matches. For example, if I searched for 'ney', I got all the files that had the word 'money' in them.

Do this little test. Export all your notes as a single xml file. Open it in a text editor like Notepad++. Do a search and you will get instant results.

Windows might be slow because it's scanning thousands of folders and hundreds of thousands or millions of files, depending on your system. But of course Evernote is or should be putting all its notes in a few folders so the search area is a ton less. 

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31 minutes ago, abdu said:

I use a tool called File Locator Pro and I just used it now. It searched 44,284 files, in maybe a few hundred folders (6.36GB total size) and it came back with results in 3 seconds.  

I may give your program a spin sometime (though Windows 10 search and Google Desktop are plenty for my needs, and are free), but my observation when doing searches is that other programs seem to benefit or take advantage of Windows indexing if they are using the file system.  I would have to delete the indexing files to get results like I used to get, since I use indexing most file based searches are very fact on my computer. 

I do sometimes use a web browser if I export everything as an html,  but not often since I tend to work mainly with most recently changed notes.

Maybe I had a bug before, but I would say 3 minutes is not a stretch without indexing, at least with 96 GB  worth of files on my storage drive alone.

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11 hours ago, Don Dz said:

I may give your program a spin sometime (though Windows 10 search and Google Desktop are plenty for my needs, and are free), but my observation when doing searches is that other programs seem to benefit or take advantage of Windows indexing if they are using the file system.  I would have to delete the indexing files to get results like I used to get, since I use indexing most file based searches are very fact on my computer. 

I do sometimes use a web browser if I export everything as an html,  but not often since I tend to work mainly with most recently changed notes.

Maybe I had a bug before, but I would say 3 minutes is not a stretch without indexing, at least with 96 GB  worth of files on my storage drive alone.

Searching across all your drives vs Evernote few folders and files are comparing apples with oranges. Evernote should be able to use non indexed searches and get results in a split second. There's no excuse at all. Some engineers over there thought searches must be indexed for good performance. The average Evernote user doesn't have a number of notes that will make a search take seconds.

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5 hours ago, CalS said:

Pray tell what technology does that?

A program is as smart (or as dumb) as the programmer who programmed it. I am a software engineer. How would I have created Evernote's search functionality? Search is a very important feature for documents. A note is considered a document. I will have two search implementations. One index based and one isn't which supports regex, boolean, DOS expressions and so on. I can make the default one the indexed one. The user has the option to make the other one the default. If I am smart, I can let Evernote decide which one to use based on the number and size of the user's notes. If Evernote can return result results in less 2 second or less in scan search mode, maybe I'll make the scanning search the default. Imagine I had a note with a password I entered 2 years ago like airplane123. Today I remember and I am certain that there's a password that had 123 in it but I can't remember the full password. I search for '123' and get no results back. I hate you Evernote!
My workaround is to select all the notes, export them into an enex file and open it in a text editor and let the editor find it in a split second. Well darn it, why can't Evernote do the same thing?? Because it's using an index search as its only search method and it doesn't give the user any other choice to search inside Evernote. Well that's dumb you say.

 

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13 hours ago, abdu said:

A program is as smart (or as dumb) as the programmer who programmed it.

Is there any consideration for technical limitations or funding?

>>My workaround is to select all the notes, export them into an enex file and open it in a text editor and let the editor find it in a split second.

Does this work with embeded documents; pdfs, images, office/iwork documents, ...?

In my backups I maintain an html export on my Mac.  
It's also searchable but thats via the Mac index process.

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13 minutes ago, DTLow said:

Is there any consideration for technical limitations or funding for development costs?

>>My workaround is to select all the notes, export them into an enex file and open it in a text editor and let the editor find it in a split second.

Does this work with embeded documents; pdfs, images, office/iwork documents, ...?

In my backups I maintain an html export on my Mac.  
It's also searchable but thats via the Mac index process.

 

Not with the enex format. I am on Windows. I can export into a single or multiple html files and the pdf files will be exported as pdf files. Then I can use File Locator Pro to search through text, pdf and Office documents. It's a commercial product which I purchased. I can't live without it and use it on daily basis in my work. It's very fast and very capable. It can also build an index and use indexed search. You're on Mac so I guess this app won't help you but I think there are similar Mac apps.

Only EverNote guys can explain why they haven't implemented search within words.

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I want to add, that I recently contacted EN support with this problem. As there are languages, which have words which are put together with several word parts. For example in german: "Gesamtelternkonferenz". When searching for content I surely would try "eltern" because this is the word which comes to mind first. Evernote would NEVER find any information about it. This is only because of the nature of the language used. EN search to date does not address this language specific problem. The search engine is optimised for english only. Support told me, they would escalate this language perspective of the problem to product manager as they do not want to discriminate users by their language used.

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12 minutes ago, Alxa said:

I want to add, that I recently contacted EN support with this problem. As there are languages, which have words which are put together with several word parts. For example in german: "Gesamtelternkonferenz". When searching for content I surely would try "eltern" because this is the word which comes to mind first. Evernote would NEVER find any information about it. This is only because of the nature of the language used. EN search to date does not address this language specific problem. The search engine is optimised for english only. Support told me, they would escalate this language perspective of the problem to product manager as they do not want to discriminate users by their language used.

It's not a language specific issue. If EN supports partial searches on latin based languages, it will work in these languages

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7 minutes ago, abdu said:

It's not a language specific issue. If EN supports partial searches on latin based languages, it will work in these languages

Sure, but it does not support partial search WITHIN words which is for some languages much more important (or even essential) than for others.

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This is very frustrating.  After investing hours and hours getting all my info into Evernote, now I run into this problem.  This is very frustrating.  Did I mention that it is frustrating.  

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Partial Word Searches are a needed part of any good search engine.   I don't care if they make it a box you have to check everytime beside the search field with a popup warning that it make take a while.    IT IS NEEDED!    I just got done searching for "2450" to see if I had made any notes of what battery a smartthings multipurpose vibration sensor took.  The search returned nothing so I took the time to create a note about it, only later to find I had two other notes with CR2450 in the notes, and had not thought to enter the full string when I did the search.

This is the first well known database-like program I have ever used that doesn't have that feature.    Not good.

 

Jay Dearmond - Electrical & Software Engineer

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There are pros and cons with a search that looks for ANY occurrence of a string, not only as it is now for it at the beginning of a word.

The positive side you have described.

The negative side (because EN allows to search without a syntax, just by dropping a few characters) that in many searches the number of notes found would grow significantly. This can make it harder to locate a certain content at the first try. It makes a difference whether you get 20 notes as Your search result, or 200.

My personal impression (no inside knowledge, just observation) is that currently major changes in search are not on the agenda. There was this improvement about punctuation a short while ago, but I think at the moment resources are dedicated at releasing Tasks (beyond the early access), closing the feature gap (printing, integrated opening of attachments in the associated programs …) and bug fixing.

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48 minutes ago, PinkElephant said:

As I tried to say: An interesting feature request, but probably nothing for the next future. I don’t see EN rebuilding the whole search index and code to implement it.

There are no cons here when Evernote gives the user the option to include partial searches. These are notes written over many years. There are times when I remember part of a word and I NEED to find notes that contain it. Don't worry about the number of returned notes. If I have time to go through 200 notes then give me that option. 
If it returns many notes, I can simply add more characters. All text editors, browsers and many software provide the ability to search by partial words. If it exists, show it 
Improve the search functionality. It's not rocket surgery. There are many open source libraries that can do this.

I don't know why Evernote is spending time on some Tasks feature or whatever that thing means or does. Stick with Notes and being able to slice and dice and search them in  different ways. It's a notes app. We want to be able to find our notes. We don't want the software to get bloated with non notes related features while ignoring what many users have been asking for years.

Did many users ask for this Tasks thing? 

They created that restaurant rating, location, review feature/add on and they then removed it. Proof they waste time and energy on features that are not badly needed.
 

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1 hour ago, PinkElephant said:

As I tried to say: An interesting feature request, but probably nothing for the next future. I don’t see EN rebuilding the whole search index and code to implement it.

Do you know how their search works exactly to suggest it's too much work to enhance it? 
I posted this post in 2016. FIVE YEARS! How many years do you think they need to add this feature!?

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No idea … I think they even didn’t start. Yes, they deliberately ignored this valuable input (wow, happens all the time).

If you have an index that is build on the beginning of a word, it is quite obvious that it is build in a different way than one that covers every string at any position.

When you want to see it work, go to a search page (I did it on mobile) and type one letter after the other, slowly. You see how the search is running through the index, renewing with each letter, showing possible search hits.

When I type an „F“, with the first letter more than 97% of all entries are already excluded. All other letters, all numbers. Pretty fast a word will show that matches what you search. Click it, done.

If they would allow to search everywhere in the word, it takes significantly longer to get to that point. This is the positive side.

The negative is the prefix problem. No easy way to do both, I’m afraid.

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Export all the notes into a single .enex file and open that file in any text editor. Do a search in the editor and it will find anything instantly. So even without using an index, any kind of search is super fast. Surely anyone can wait a second for the first result to show up even if there are thousands of notes. We're not talking minutes here.

IMO, any excuse for not implementing partial searches is super lame.

 

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The notes are on your machine. The search is done on your machine.
There's no simultaneous access by thousands of users. That's when users are syncing their notes with Evernote on Evernote servers in the cloud. That's a totally different thing. 

Indexing helps to get instant results and it's not the only way to search.  When someone wants to do partial then search regular search is fine. Users should be able to get results instead of no capability to do partial search.

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6.25 is end of life. EN has made it clear there will be no changes made, not even to fix any bugs that may exist. This is all one needs to know about changing the search on the local database. This dead horse will not rise again, no matter how hard you beat it.

v10 depends on server action. Even when offline the search algorithms are the same as when searching online. At least it looks the same, and produces the same results.

As explained above - searching for the beginning of text strings has advantages as well. It tends to narrow a search down much faster than by allowing any string to show in search results.

But the discussion is futil. You can go and ask EN again to change their basic search concept any time you want. IMHO the likelihood of this thread to go on for another 5 years is pretty high.

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I just export the notes and search in them my own way when I need to. I have decided years ago I wasn't going to wait for the company to implement partial search. 

I am just replying to you here for the sake of discussion and because you seem to come up with excuses for the company when these excuses or reasons are weak.
I have proposed the feature 5 years ago. They had plenty of time to implement it.  I know they're putting their energy on the new version. My request still holds. Put then in the new version. Forget v6. 

I don't know why you keep bringing up searching for beginning of text. Partial search means searching for parts of texts no matter where it's located in a word. 
If the beginning of word search works now, great. But that's part of the story.

We'll see what the new version will look like. When I tried it a few months ago, it felt like a crippled version with fewer features than 6.x.
All I can hope for is they implement partial search in the new version. All I saw is them reapplying and porting the same features from 6 to the new one. I haven't been following what new features are going to be in the new one.

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Yes, they stripped everything down to go their new web-based interface I guess, and now it just seems like we are waiting for it to get back to the feature set we had.  Even Export suffered it seemed like which used to be my favorite thing about Evernote.   Exporting the entire database is harder now last time I checked.

Unfortunately I agree they will likely not give the "partial string search no matter where it exists in a word string" any effort anytime soon.

I have been looking at OneNote more and more with the way things are going, and may look for other options also.

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10 minutes ago, abdu said:

A lot of people went to OneNote when Evernote put the restriction of having only 2 devices that can be synced in the free plan. 

Non-paying users     
The plan is working 🙂

Does OneNote have a free plan?

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AFAIK ON 2016 is free. It is practically a desktop app, one can sync through OneDrive.

The cloud version is part of O365 - who has got a subscription can use ON for free.

My problem with ON is not the plans they offer. I just don’t like it at all, to me it feels like wanted but not executed.

Personally I have no problem with EN users who decide to use the free plan - it is up to them, as long as EN offers it they can use it. I have no problem with free users departing either - out of the same reason. Anybody needs to decide what fits the own use case best. 

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