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Search fails to distinguish tilde from hyphen, recognize colons, or recognize phrases


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Evernote search fails a lot. Here are just a few circumstances in which search does not work correctly:

1) Searching for ~06 brings up results that include every occurrence of -06 (with a hyphen instead of a tilde) 

2) Searching for 06: or "06:" (with quotes around it to specify the exact phrase, including the colon) brings up every occurrence of 06 (without the colon)

3) Searching for "no walk" (with quotes around it to specify the exact phrase), brings up every occurrence of the word "no" or the word "walk"

In Evernote, how does one search for exactly "~06" or exactly "no walk"?

Annotated example screenshots attached.

 

Search failure - exact phrase.png

Search failure - tilde.png

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6 minutes ago, 100WattWalrus said:

1) Searching for ~06 brings up results that include every occurrence of -06 (with a hyphen instead of a tilde) 

 2) Searching for 06: or "06:" (with quotes around it to specify the exact phrase, including the colon) brings up every occurrence of 06 (without the colon)

 3) Searching for "no walk" (with quotes around it to specify the exact phrase), brings up every occurrence of the word "no" or the word "walk"

Evernote search indexing ignores special characters, except for underscore (_)
Stop words are also dropped

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10 minutes ago, DTLow said:

Evernote search indexing ignores special characters, except for underscore (_)
Stop words are also dropped

Why? That makes it impossible to search for times or dates within the text, among other things. If I'm keeping a diary and want to find all the days on which I woke up at 06:30, how would I do that? And what about exact phrases like "no walk"? How do I find those?

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1 hour ago, 100WattWalrus said:

If I'm keeping a diary and want to find all the days on which I woke up at 06:30, how would I do that?

I would still search for 06:30 and know the result will include invalid entries, like 06?30 and 06$30 and 06&30 and 06 30

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17 minutes ago, DTLow said:

I would still search for 6:30 and know the result will include invalid entries, like 6?30 and 6$30 and 6&30 and 6 30

Not to mention every single mention of any day in June from any year ever — 2018-06-30, 2017-06-15, 2016-06-01. Makes it literally impossible to succeed in this search when using Evernote to keep a diary.

And why on earth would Evernote be programmed to ignore anything within quotes? That's the whole point of quotes around a search string. It means to look for only that exact phrase. Deliberately ignoring parts of an exact phrase means searching for exact phrases doesn't work. If in my diary, I want to find days I did not walk ("no walk" or "did not walk"), as opposed to days I did (15m walk, 45m walk, 90m walk), that's apparently impossible in Evernote? Is that the upshot here?

Any idea what the point is of Evernote ignoring the existence of punctuation and many of the most common words in the English language? And sacrificing search capability in the process?

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25 minutes ago, 100WattWalrus said:

that's apparently impossible in Evernote? Is that the upshot here?

Confirmed.  That's the current situation in Evernote.
Yes. It sucks.

My fallback is to perform such searches outside of Evernote.
I maintain as backup an html export of Evernote.  Finder searches on my Mac don't have these limitations.

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10 minutes ago, DTLow said:

Confirmed.  That's the current situation in Evernote.
Yes. It sucks.

My fallback is to perform such searches outside of Evernote.
I maintain as backup an html export of Evernote.  Searches on my Mac don't have these limitations.

Good thinking. I'll do the same. Thanks for the idea...and the help!

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