abdu

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.