Jump to content

Bringing Search to Life in Evernote Web


Recommended Posts

  • Shane D. featured and pinned this topic
  • Level 5*

I am already getting super nervous about that several of these behind the scenes videos show truncated text in different places..

For example in this video @0.55 you can see that the text maxes out at about 30 letters. With all that screen estate, why would you have that limit? I am relying heavily on that Ctrl+Q search on Windows can display up to 100 letters. I therefore sure hope that this isn't going to replace Ctrl+Q search..

Except for that, it looks great! :)

  • Like 1
Link to comment
  • Level 5*

New search looks pretty good -- I'm looking forward to getting my hands on it. This feels like the coming together of a lot of interesting & good ideas that have all come together in a more complete, cohesive design.

One thing, and maybe it didn't come out in the demo: when starting with the "tag:" prefix, I didn't see any suggestions come along as "succulent" was being typed. Did I miss that? I would have thought that rather hitting the typo, you should have seen the "succulent" tag in the list so you could pick it directly.  I think that that's an important piece to go hand in hand with suggestions for literal text terms; the "tag:" prefix is just a gimme. And the facility for offering suggestions based that match anywhere in the suggestion rather than  just the prefix (so that typing "succ" would offer up, say, "unsuccessful" as well as "succulent" suggestions) would be helpful too.

Also: as you add new search terms. will it be easy to back out of them without losing the current state of the search box, as in, having added several terms, and after having typed several characters into the search box, can you pop over to the search term display and delete one, and have everything adjust?

OK, that was several things, but search is really important.

Link to comment
  • Level 5*

Looks a bit like Ctrl+Q with the addition of suggestions and much improved filtering capabilities post first search.  Hopefully some control on the suggestions since that can become problematic noise, context anyone?  Secondary filtering looks really cool. 

Will be interesting to see if speed has been addressed as info is "pulling from the backend".  In general from a desktop app perspective interactive letter by letter search is slower web based as opposed to on the client machine.  Current Windows Preview takes from 2 to 5 seconds to get results after hitting enter.  Current Windows desktop is instantaneous.  That will get old quickly.  Not to mention the note totals are different which is another story... maybe related to PDF OCR differences on the server versus the client, which exists today, client being more accurate in my experience.

Not ragging here, just trying to point out some other expectations which may exist beyond a modern looking search.

  • Thanks 1
Link to comment
  • Ex Employees
17 minutes ago, Stacey said:

Will it still be possible to shortcut our saved searches?

Stacey -

If I understand your question correctly, I think the answer is "yes".  If you look carefully at this part of the video:  https://youtu.be/_ZJqSR_MWmw?t=218 you can see the option to save as a shortcut as well in the dialog box allowing us to save the search.  If that's not what you mean, please ask again!

Back to lurking...

ian

  • Like 1
Link to comment

I'm a heavy user of hyphenated tags. For example, if I were traveling to Portland, I would tag notes using the following tags: portland-food, portland-accommodation, portland-tourism, portland-history, and portland-transportation. It would be convenient (and logical) if hyphens were unnecessary. Instead, I would use five non-hyphenated tags: portland, food, accommodation, tourism, and transportation.

In this scenario, if "portland" is entered as a search term and the user clicks on this tag, then other tags that exist in notes with "portland" tags are offered as suggestions: food, accommodation, tourism, history, and transportation.

This would be a better way to search than tag:portland  tag:food  as is the current method.

Maybe this is how the new search is designed and I missed it.

 

  • Like 1
Link to comment
  • Level 5*
16 hours ago, Jason Goldsmith said:

Maybe this is how the new search is designed and I missed it.

At about the 3 minute mark after the search for the succulent tag other tags appear at the top of the filter list.  Kinda looks like it is doing what you want it to do.  Experts need to advise.

And, I think separate tags is the way to go in any case.  FWIW.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Em 24/10/2019 at 14:25, Shane D. disse:

Hi All,

In one of the first episodes of Evernote Behind the Scenes, CEO Ian Small and senior designer Mariano discussed our plan to improve search in Evernote Web. At the time, it was just that: a plan.

Now Ian checks in with May, a senior product manager at Evernote, to see how that plan has become a reality.

They put a working version of Evernote’s improved, soon-to-be-released search through its paces, showing how it really is “more interactive, more meaningful, and ever more useful."
 

 

Excelent news guys. Keep up with the good work. 
 

cant wait to have this on Mac

  • Like 1
Link to comment
  • Level 5*
2 hours ago, Jason Goldsmith said:

I'm a heavy user of hyphenated tags. For example, if I were traveling to Portland, I would tag notes using the following tags: portland-food, portland-accommodation, portland-tourism, portland-history, and portland-transportation. It would be convenient (and logical) if hyphens were unnecessary. Instead, I would use five non-hyphenated tags: portland, food, accommodation, tourism, and transportation.

In this scenario, if "portland" is entered as a search term and the user clicks on this tag, then other tags that exist in notes with "portland" tags are offered as suggestions: food, accommodation, tourism, history, and transportation.

This would be a better way to search than tag:portland  tag:food  as is the current method.

The tag naming thing is is one of the "great" Evernote usability debates: separate tag name (tag:portland tag:food, etc.) vs. combination tag names (tag:portland-food, etc.). I prefer the former; it seems more natural because that's generally how English (my native tongue, German speakers may differ on this :))works. We say "little red car" rather than "little-red-car", and the separate tags are more flexible, too: I can describe more things with fewer separate tags, because coming up with combination tags for everything gets, well, combinatoric (mathematically, that is). And that's not to mention the sub-tag ordering thing (which tag do do I make? "car-little-red", "car-red-little", "little-red-car", "red-little-car", etc?). But horses for courses, as they say. If tags can be found via partial matches; e.g., I type "food" and "portland-food" is offered up as a selection, then that's helpful. If it doesn't, then it makes combination tags a lot less useful.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
  • Level 5*
1 hour ago, CalS said:

At about the 3 minute mark after the search for the succulent tag other tags appear at the top of the filter list.  Kinda look like it is doing what you want it to do.  Experts need to advise.

I was thinking more along the lines of the section starting around the 4 minute mark, where they type in "tag:succlent", but I didn't see any suggestions come up. Maybe they were typing too quickly for the suggestions to show up, so hard to tell. It'd just seem that the presence of "tag:" would help to narrow any suggestions for subsequent letters to just tags rather than text or notebooks.

  • Like 1
Link to comment

As a primarily 'EN-for-Windows' user, the extent to which I use EN' existing search functionality, centres largely on Saved-Searches added to the toolbar as a Shortcut, for easy & quick visual navigation.  This has largely been due to an early perception I had, that I couldn't trust EN search results, or it returned to many results to sift through.  From that point I adopted an alpha numeric 'notebook' and 'note' naming-convention that allowed me to quickly and easily point-n-click navigate through the hierarchy of Stack > Notebook > Note... to get to what I needed fast, akin to MS File Explorer approach I grew up with.

On the odd occasion that my approach given above, failed me, then I would use 'ALL Notes Search' -or- the relevant shortcut keys (see image below)

image.png.e4d5528fa359efbe481d81dc318533eb.png

But even this required possibly multiple steps of using one of the Shortcuts or the 'ALL Notes' search.  But after seeing the video of the soon to be released new EN search, I am very please with what EN and Team have done, great work and I too am excited to start using it. Indeed it will probably make me do a review of how I add content to EN.

The new Search interface has/includes it all (see screenshot below):

  • Notebooks & Tags & Notes & Recent Searches
  • Search results reduce with each additional character entered in the search field, and EN search is looking for those characters anywhere in the text (thinks its called infix) not just the prefix
  • The ability to progressively filter after each search returned search results...awesome

image.png.13606340d23a564d9943f6f3d03df6b3.png

I think for me an early issue I had with EN-Search was results being return due to OCR matching... perhaps that's another filter that could be added.  In other words, if you're looking for this word specific to an image use this filter/tag or whatever.  

Anyhoo, awesome and love it, cheers.

Link to comment

Happy to see another video released and happy to see real functionality demonstrated. The Evernote team had seemed to go "dark" for a couple of months since the last video, and I was starting to get a little concerned that perhaps they had hit some major snags (or worse). The last time EN went dark for a few months there was a management and strategic shake-up...

Could we get an update on the beta program(s)? Many users on these forums and on Reddit indicate they have signed up for the Beta for multiple platforms and not heard anything from EN. I count myself among that population. May indicated that these changes will be rolled out soon to a small population who are testing the new web experience and that the apps would get it "in time." That's all fine and good, but can we get an update on the beta testing for the apps? Are any of those in preview mode yet, and if not yet, could we get an indication of when? Are we talking most likely not until 2020?

Thanks and keep up the good work.

  • Like 2
Link to comment
  • Ex Employees
8 hours ago, CalS said:

At about the 3 minute mark after the search for the succulent tag other tags appear at the top of the filter list.  Kinda look like it is doing what you want it to do.  Experts need to advise.

Experts say: Yes, the refinement suggestions supplied in the menu are based on the current search scope.  At the beginning, the scope is "All Notes".  From that point forward, as you build a search iteratively, the search won't (at least, should not! 🙂 official allowance for product-feature-not-in-GA-yet) suggest something that isn't contained in the current scope.

To @Jason Goldsmith's question, if you used the tag portland as your first scope refinement (however you enter it, by pulling it off the search menu or typing tag:portland), the suggestions provided should only be those that make sense in that context.  To his point, he'd get food, tourism, accommodation, history, and transportation suggested as tag refinements.  (He might not get all of them at the start because of space limitations, but as he started to type, they'd narrow in and get suggested.) . He wouldn't get sunshine as a suggested tag, on the assumption that it's unlikely that there would be a note tagged with portland *and* sunshine (herewith a formal apology to all insulted portlandians for that needless cheapshot; my excuse is that it's late on a Friday night).  On the other hand, if he'd started his search scope with honolulu, sunshine might get suggested as a tag refinement.

To a couple of @jefito's questions:

First, at 4:54 (after the initial typo for tag:succlent is corrected to tag:succulent), you can see we provide the same filtering suggestions that we do if you'd typed "succulent" or "succ" and clicked on the tag in the drop down.

Second, the focus for this design and  implementation has been on providing a more powerful search capability and demystifying the search interface for the largest cross-section of users we can target.  We wanted to avoid disempowering our super-pro users, so we made sure that the advanced search syntax still works.  And where it made sense, we tied the advanced search syntax back into the interactive mode.  What we haven't done (at least at this stage) is try to wire some of the suggestion and auto-completion capabilities into the middle of entering advanced search terms - so, as you pointed out, couldn't we have either offered to auto-complete tag:succ into tag:succulent or auto-correct tag:succlent into tag:succulent?  Answer, yes, of course; but at this point that's not where we've invested the engineering effort.  For better or worse, that's been a conscious decision and how we've tried to accommodate both worlds right now at this point in redesigning and improving search.

We need to see how this design plays in the real world to figure out where we should next invest energy.  We do have some further work already queued in the hopper to fully finish what we view as the first full phase of this work, but it requires more heavy lifting in the back-end before we can wire it all up, so it's waiting on a much longer pole.  In the meantime, we want to make sure what we have is working well, make sure we continue to tune it, observe performance in the wild and tune/improve as needed, and learn at scale in the real world to determine the next most impactful place for us to focus our search-related energies.

All in all, search occupies about 1/3 of May's time across her part of the product function portfolio.  So it's a big, ongoing deal for us and for her.

Back to lurking for real this time
ian

 

  • Like 2
Link to comment
3 horas atrás, Ian Small disse:

Experts say: Yes, the refinement suggestions supplied in the menu are based on the current search scope.  At the beginning, the scope is "All Notes".  From that point forward, as you build a search iteratively, the search won't (at least, should not! 🙂 official allowance for product-feature-not-in-GA-yet) suggest something that isn't contained in the current scope.

To @Jason Goldsmith's question, if you used the tag portland as your first scope refinement (however you enter it, by pulling it off the search menu or typing tag:portland), the suggestions provided should only be those that make sense in that context.  To his point, he'd get food, tourism, accommodation, history, and transportation suggested as tag refinements.  (He might not get all of them at the start because of space limitations, but as he started to type, they'd narrow in and get suggested.) . He wouldn't get sunshine as a suggested tag, on the assumption that it's unlikely that there would be a note tagged with portland *and* sunshine (herewith a formal apology to all insulted portlandians for that needless cheapshot; my excuse is that it's late on a Friday night).  On the other hand, if he'd started his search scope with honolulu, sunshine might get suggested as a tag refinement.

To a couple of @jefito's questions:

First, at 4:54 (after the initial typo for tag:succlent is corrected to tag:succulent), you can see we provide the same filtering suggestions that we do if you'd typed "succulent" or "succ" and clicked on the tag in the drop down.

Second, the focus for this design and  implementation has been on providing a more powerful search capability and demystifying the search interface for the largest cross-section of users we can target.  We wanted to avoid disempowering our super-pro users, so we made sure that the advanced search syntax still works.  And where it made sense, we tied the advanced search syntax back into the interactive mode.  What we haven't done (at least at this stage) is try to wire some of the suggestion and auto-completion capabilities into the middle of entering advanced search terms - so, as you pointed out, couldn't we have either offered to auto-complete tag:succ into tag:succulent or auto-correct tag:succlent into tag:succulent?  Answer, yes, of course; but at this point that's not where we've invested the engineering effort.  For better or worse, that's been a conscious decision and how we've tried to accommodate both worlds right now at this point in redesigning and improving search.

We need to see how this design plays in the real world to figure out where we should next invest energy.  We do have some further work already queued in the hopper to fully finish what we view as the first full phase of this work, but it requires more heavy lifting in the back-end before we can wire it all up, so it's waiting on a much longer pole.  In the meantime, we want to make sure what we have is working well, make sure we continue to tune it, observe performance in the wild and tune/improve as needed, and learn at scale in the real world to determine the next most impactful place for us to focus our search-related energies.

All in all, search occupies about 1/3 of May's time across her part of the product function portfolio.  So it's a big, ongoing deal for us and for her.

Back to lurking for real this time
ian

 

I just love when the CEO of the app that I love shows up in the user forum. This is awesome!

  • Like 3
  • Thanks 2
Link to comment

Nice search tool !

Is this possible to add "reminders" to the search ? Eg : Search for the notes of a client and ad the "reminder" option to see if there's still things to do to a specific time.

I still hope there will be an option to ad a reminder to the notes on the new version 😇

Link to comment
  • Level 5*
1 hour ago, piew said:

Is this possible to add "reminders" to the search ? Eg : Search for the notes of a client and ad the "reminder" option to see if there's still things to do to a specific time.

Reminders are available in the current search feature
My current task list is generated by   reminderOrder:* -reminderTime:day+1 -reminderDoneTime:*    
(all reminders, exclude future dated, exclude completed)

  • Like 1
Link to comment
1 hour ago, DTLow said:

Reminders are available in the current search feature
My current task list is generated by   reminderOrder:* -reminderTime:day+1 -reminderDoneTime:*    
(all reminders, exclude future dated, exclude completed)

Hey thanks ! 

And can you add or remove a reminder to a note with this web version ? 

Link to comment

Looks great. Just got an invite to Beta, so logged into Evernote - search is as it always has been, no interactive results, no fixing typos. So refreshed page - no dice. Logged out. Cleared cache of all things Evernote and logged back in. Still nothing. 
Editor is Beta Editor, and offers feedback on that (I did not get a notification that it was there).

So - is Search held up as I am flagged to Beta Editor? Or am I missing something else?

Wanna try it - looks like a great step (leap even) forward!

(BTW the link to forums to discuss this in the email also does not work - doesn't find that appropriate forum)

Link to comment
On 10/24/2019 at 8:21 PM, jefito said:

New search looks pretty good -- I'm looking forward to getting my hands on it. This feels like the coming together of a lot of interesting & good ideas that have all come together in a more complete, cohesive design.

One thing, and maybe it didn't come out in the demo: when starting with the "tag:" prefix, I didn't see any suggestions come along as "succulent" was being typed. Did I miss that? I would have thought that rather hitting the typo, you should have seen the "succulent" tag in the list so you could pick it directly.  I think that that's an important piece to go hand in hand with suggestions for literal text terms; the "tag:" prefix is just a gimme. And the facility for offering suggestions based that match anywhere in the suggestion rather than  just the prefix (so that typing "succ" would offer up, say, "unsuccessful" as well as "succulent" suggestions) would be helpful too.

Also: as you add new search terms. will it be easy to back out of them without losing the current state of the search box, as in, having added several terms, and after having typed several characters into the search box, can you pop over to the search term display and delete one, and have everything adjust?

OK, that was several things, but search is really important.

@jefito Thanks for your thoughts. I'll look into populating suggestions for search syntax. Regarding deleting the search terms, it is in fact as you described - you can easily delete any of them by clicking on the "x" and the search will automatically adjust.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
On 10/26/2019 at 12:38 AM, Paul A. said:

Happy to see another video released and happy to see real functionality demonstrated. The Evernote team had seemed to go "dark" for a couple of months since the last video, and I was starting to get a little concerned that perhaps they had hit some major snags (or worse). The last time EN went dark for a few months there was a management and strategic shake-up...

Could we get an update on the beta program(s)? Many users on these forums and on Reddit indicate they have signed up for the Beta for multiple platforms and not heard anything from EN. I count myself among that population. May indicated that these changes will be rolled out soon to a small population who are testing the new web experience and that the apps would get it "in time." That's all fine and good, but can we get an update on the beta testing for the apps? Are any of those in preview mode yet, and if not yet, could we get an indication of when? Are we talking most likely not until 2020?

Thanks and keep up the good work.

@Paul A. We just released this new search functionality to beta users today! You should have received an email. We are looking forward to hearing what you think.

Link to comment
On 10/27/2019 at 7:52 AM, piew said:

Is this possible to add "reminders" to the search ? Eg : Search for the notes of a client and ad the "reminder" option to see if there's still things to do to a specific time.

No specific date yet but please know that this one is in the works!

  • Like 2
Link to comment
On 10/24/2019 at 11:45 PM, CalS said:

Looks a bit like Ctrl+Q with the addition of suggestions and much improved filtering capabilities post first search.  Hopefully some control on the suggestions since that can become problematic noise, context anyone?  Secondary filtering looks really cool. 

Will be interesting to see if speed has been addressed as info is "pulling from the backend".  In general from a desktop app perspective interactive letter by letter search is slower web based as opposed to on the client machine.  Current Windows Preview takes from 2 to 5 seconds to get results after hitting enter.  Current Windows desktop is instantaneous.  That will get old quickly.  Not to mention the note totals are different which is another story... maybe related to PDF OCR differences on the server versus the client, which exists today, client being more accurate in my experience.

Not ragging here, just trying to point out some other expectations which may exist beyond a modern looking search.

@CalS Fast performance is a key priority for the search team so please know that we keep a close eye on this. The video reflects the true speed. Since Windows preview is in the early stages, there may other things affecting the performance there. But please note that search in Windows preview does not reflect search in the new modern Evernote web. I'd encourage you to join the beta program if you want to take the new search experience for a test drive now. 

Link to comment
  • Level 5

@nigebj 

Quote

Looks great. Just got an invite to Beta, so logged into Evernote - search is as it always has been, no interactive results, no fixing typos. So refreshed page - no dice. Logged out. Cleared cache of all things Evernote and logged back in. Still nothing. 
Editor is Beta Editor, and offers feedback on that (I did not get a notification that it was there).

So - is Search held up as I am flagged to Beta Editor? Or am I missing something else?

Is it possible that you have multiple Evernote Accounts that use different email addresses?

I ask, as we enabled the beta search features for a certain number of accounts, so we may have enabled it for one account but not for the other.

If you do have two accounts, could you try using the other account and see if your access is available?

Let me know if you have any other questions!

Link to comment
  • Level 5*
44 minutes ago, May Lam said:

@CalS Fast performance is a key priority for the search team so please know that we keep a close eye on this. The video reflects the true speed. Since Windows preview is in the early stages, there may other things affecting the performance there. But please note that search in Windows preview does not reflect search in the new modern Evernote web. I'd encourage you to join the beta program if you want to take the new search experience for a test drive now. 

Thanks for the response.  I realize that Windows Web and Desktop previews are at different stages.  My point in the previous post was that if Windows desktop starts using the backend for search it will most likely perform like On Demand Sync does, which is slower than a desktop not running ODS.

I am a Beta tester and I just gave new search a spin. 

  1. Search entry is responsive, not quite as fast as the video but options are presented quick enough, nice. 
  2. The incremental filtering options are great for tuning, though  couldn't find office document filters.
  3. May be a use case thing but most of the time (90%?) the recommended stuff is of no value to me.  Maybe because I typically start searches with a tag to cull the list.  Will no doubt come in handy for the occasional text search.
  4. Tags seem to be the last things that appear and only two in the first layer of the search.  After you select a tag there are more in the second layer of the search. 
    • Example I don't use many prefixed tags.  I do use 1040 as a prefix for taxes tags.  So there are six that start with 1040.Sched, only two appear in the beta list.  This wasn't any better on previous web. 
    • OTOH, both Ctrl+Q and Shift+Alt+T in the current desktop present a list of the tags for selection after typing 1040.  Point being it would be a shame to lose these capabilities if Web beta is the search engine of the future.
  5. Just an observation, search terms aren't highlighted in note titles, which may be the only place the term appears in some notes..
  6. Sort options for the note list don't stick, which may be a beta thing, but it makes it harder to test as things move about.
  7. Downside, some not particularly complex notes took ten seconds or more to display after completing the search action.  Most took from two to five seconds which were the best times.  All of which is slower than previous web which did not lag, for me anyway.

Some context here.  I've been using EN for 10 years and have tailored my workflow.  I don't use the web version that often, feature poor and slow to me.  The bulk of the time I have an idea as to what tag(s) to start a search with (I only have 400 or so for 44k notes) and then I use text if need be.  So things like relevance and recommendations just don't hold much value for me.  The incremental filters are a big add.  Responsiveness is important, the mind wanders too quickly.  This is flavored in the above feedback, no disrespect intended.

Link to comment
15 hours ago, May Lam said:

@Paul A. We just released this new search functionality to beta users today! You should have received an email. We are looking forward to hearing what you think.

Thanks for weighing in! Unfortunately, did not receive an email, nor do I see any noticeable changes to the web editor. (No search suggestions when I type in the search box, for example.)

Is there any way of confirming my enrollment in the beta program? Thanks!

Link to comment
  • Level 5

@Paul A.

Thanks for reaching out!

You recently wrote:

Quote

Thanks for weighing in! Unfortunately, did not receive an email, nor do I see any noticeable changes to the web editor. (No search suggestions when I type in the search box, for example.)

Is there any way of confirming my enrollment in the beta program? Thanks!

There were only a certain number of accounts that were invited for this specific search beta, and it doesn't appear that the beta features are enabled for your account.

That being said, please feel free to reach out to me via DM if you're interested in joining the beta!

Link to comment
On 10/28/2019 at 5:12 PM, Shane D. said:

@nigebj 

Is it possible that you have multiple Evernote Accounts that use different email addresses?

I ask, as we enabled the beta search features for a certain number of accounts, so we may have enabled it for one account but not for the other.

If you do have two accounts, could you try using the other account and see if your access is available?

Let me know if you have any other questions!

@Shane D. - per PM, you nailed it. Thanks for figuring it out, and getting it resolved for me.

  • Like 1
Link to comment

My honest, immediate reaction is that I'm actually pretty disappointed. It might just be the video was a little dumbed down, but I really thought we were going to finally get true Boolean search and the ability to have negative terms/tags as well as positives.

Does anyone who's lucky enough to try the beta know whether you can introduce logic to your searches and negative elements?

I'm genuinely hopeful that it's there and just wasn't the subject of the video.

Can anyone clarify?

Thanks, David.

Link to comment
  • Level 5*
On 10/31/2019 at 11:40 AM, Happy Chap said:

ability to have negative terms/tags as well as positives.

Negatives like  -tag:test    
It's already a feature in the current Search, and works well in the beta

Link to comment
  • Level 5*
17 minutes ago, DTLow said:

Negatives like  -tag:test    
It's already a feature in the current Search

For tags yes, but not for notebooks.  I would find it useful to easily exclude a notebook from search, instead of using a tag work around.

Link to comment
  • Level 5*
On 10/31/2019 at 2:40 PM, Happy Chap said:

Does anyone who's lucky enough to try the beta know whether you can introduce logic to your searches and negative elements?

I'm genuinely hopeful that it's there and just wasn't the subject of the video.

They never said that they were changing the search language that underlies the search UI, so I'm guessing that changes like that are not planned, at least in the short term. If they had intended such changes, they would have announced them, don't you think?  I believe that the intent here is to show a new, responsive UI that makes it easier to find things in your note database with simple inputs, and one that will translate well across all of their various platforms. I'm not saying that changes to the search language wouldn't be useful, just that that's not the point here.

Link to comment
30 minutes ago, jefito said:

They never said that they were changing the search language that underlies the search UI, so I'm guessing that changes like that are not planned, at least in the short term. If they had intended such changes, they would have announced them, don't you think?  I believe that the intent here is to show a new, responsive UI that makes it easier to find things in your note database with simple inputs, and one that will translate well across all of their various platforms. I'm not saying that changes to the search language wouldn't be useful, just that that's not the point here.

I don't see a change in the inline syntax, just the container being immediately responsive with partial results and the ability to select filters suggested responses.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
  • Level 5*
On 10/28/2019 at 6:33 PM, May L said:

@jefito Thanks for your thoughts. I'll look into populating suggestions for search syntax. Regarding deleting the search terms, it is in fact as you described - you can easily delete any of them by clicking on the "x" and the search will automatically adjust.

I appreciate the clarification, and the comments from @Ian Small as well. I'll echo my original impression -- that this looks like a promising direction for search, a nice balance between ease of use and ability to continue to use the full search language. Beyond that, I was only seeking to clear up some smaller points of UX that weren't present or that I may have missed in the video; nothing major, mainly curiosity. So long as responsiveness is good and the approach translates to other platforms well, I think that this will be a nice improvement all around improvement on a key area of Evernote, namely finding your stuff.

Link to comment

@Happy Chap @DTLow @s2sailor @jefito @nigebj Thanks for the discussion re. negative syntax logic. Im happy to share that we just completed an update and the new search now accommodates a range of negative syntax including notebooks, tags, and words. Just place the negative in front of the term like so "-notebook:pet" and of course if you want to combine syntax that would work as well. For example, "tag:pet -notebook:dog -gray" will find all notes with the tag "pets" except in the notebook "dog" and except with the word "gray". Please let me know how this works out for you guys.

  • Like 2
Link to comment
29 minutes ago, May L said:

@Happy Chap @DTLow @s2sailor @jefito @nigebj Thanks for the discussion re. negative syntax logic. Im happy to share that we just completed an update and the new search now accommodates a range of negative syntax including notebooks, tags, and words. Just place the negative in front of the term like so "-notebook:pet" and of course if you want to combine syntax that would work as well. For example, "tag:pet -notebook:dog -gray" will find all notes with the tag "pets" except in the notebook "dog" and except with the word "gray". Please let me know how this works out for you guys.

This seems to work quite well (just found all of a particular subject matter which was not correctly 'filed').

Only issue I had was having selected 11 items using "<searchterm> -notebook:correct-notebook", I went through each using "Move to ..." - at some points it refreshed the list (dropping out ones I had moved) and others it did not. I could not workout what triggered it to rerun the search. This isn't a big issue, other than wasted cycles and reordering my results which of course caused some dissonance as I was trying to work through the list.

Being able to multi-select in the search results column (to allow a group of items to all be 'moved' to another notebook together) would be a real productivity booster!

Link to comment
4 minutes ago, nigebj said:

This seems to work quite well (just found all of a particular subject matter which was not correctly 'filed').

Only issue I had was having selected 11 items using "<searchterm> -notebook:correct-notebook", I went through each using "Move to ..." - at some points it refreshed the list (dropping out ones I had moved) and others it did not. I could not workout what triggered it to rerun the search. This isn't a big issue, other than wasted cycles and reordering my results which of course caused some dissonance as I was trying to work through the list.

Being able to multi-select in the search results column (to allow a group of items to all be 'moved' to another notebook together) would be a real productivity booster!

That said I notice the dynamic results seem to stop when you negate using a word which does not appear (as regular text) in the search. What I mean is:

"photography" finds a lot of my notes.

"photography -n" suggest "night photography" and "night photographer" (can't quite rationalize this as I am trying to negate the term, but that is what it does.

"photography -no" - to start building "photography -notebook:photography" suggest nothing ... despite many entries with words like "not", "note" and even "know" (because it partial matches).

So I tried ""photography per" - to build to "photography personal" (which has 13 hits) - it shows the suggestion ""photography peak" - no idea why ...

I'd assumed this was using merged results from columnar indexing of the whole - it clearly is not. So why does the (immediately) above search work as it does?

And why does negating not get considered in the suggested results (it appears to ignore the 'special' character of "-" when doing the index match which is the exactly wrong thing to do in that specific case. Ignoring some special characters possibly does make sense (maybe ignoring @ so a username might match regardless of whether prefixed) - it just does  not make sense to ignore those which are functional in the actual search term.

Link to comment
  • Level 5*
1 hour ago, May L said:

Im happy to share that we just completed an update and the new search now accommodates a range of negative syntax including notebooks, tags, and words.

Great to hear May!  Sometimes we feel that recommendations fall on deaf ears.  Glad to see evidence that we are being heard.  I'll give it a test drive.  Thanks to the team.

Link to comment

@May L Looks like exciting stuff and glad to hear there's a clear focus on streamlining some of the search capabilities. I'm sure it wasn't a particular emphasis during this phase of work, but I'm quite hopeful that all of this will eventually lay the groundwork for a more powerful "query builder" that includes the ability to do full boolean search (as described in this thread). Any thoughts on EN eventually heading that direction and potential timing?

Thanks for all the hard work!

Link to comment
  • Level 5*
9 hours ago, May L said:

@Happy Chap @DTLow @s2sailor @jefito @nigebj Thanks for the discussion re. negative syntax logic. Im happy to share that we just completed an update and the new search now accommodates a range of negative syntax including notebooks, tags, and words. Just place the negative in front of the term like so "-notebook:pet" and of course if you want to combine syntax that would work as well. For example, "tag:pet -notebook:dog -gray" will find all notes with the tag "pets" except in the notebook "dog" and except with the word "gray". Please let me know how this works out for you guys.

Not sure that I contributed all that much on negative term syntax discussion, but thanks anyways. :) 

In any case,  I'm a little curious about the use of "-notebook:" in your example, as that's not legal Evernote search syntax, at least if you go by the published grammar (https://dev.evernote.com/doc/articles/search_grammar.php) and by longstanding implementation in the Windows client and elsewhere. Does this mean that the search grammar is changing to allow it (and even better, use of mutiple notebook terms in "any:" searches, or wildcards in notebook terms "notebook:Todo*". *sound of gleeful hand rubbing*)? Edit: I'll note that the "-notebook:", even with multiple "-notebook:" terms seems to work, while  multiple "notebook:"  terms didn't.

Also, the thrust of the video was on the  suggestions generated while using the search UI, and not the actual search results. In the comment I quoted, are you referring to search suggestions, or search results? (Hence the question about the "-notebook": term).

Regardless, I'll give it a try, though I'm a little leery about the utility of suggestions resulting from negative terms. Seems a little counter-intuitive to me.

BTW, thinking a little more deeply about this makes me realize that the business of offering sensible suggestions based on some partial query is a lot harder than just returning the actual results. for that query.. I have a fair understanding about to implement speedy text search in a set of notes, bu while suggestions for tag & notebook names are easy, I don't know where I'd begin with making suggestions on text  An interesting problem, for sure.

Link to comment
  • Level 5*
5 hours ago, jefito said:

Regardless, I'll give it a try, though I'm a little leery about the utility of suggestions resulting from negative terms. Seems a little counter-intuitive to me.

More of a culling process I suppose as opposed to show me what I'm not looking for....  ;)

Link to comment

Just a note to say I love the new search. I guess I'm in that Pareto band of users who can't be bothered with Boolean etc if the "standard" search experience gets me close enough, quick enough – which from a quick play around this certainly does!

  • Like 1
Link to comment
On 10/25/2019 at 10:21 AM, jefito said:

New search looks pretty good -- I'm looking forward to getting my hands on it. This feels like the coming together of a lot of interesting & good ideas that have all come together in a more complete, cohesive design.

One thing, and maybe it didn't come out in the demo: when starting with the "tag:" prefix, I didn't see any suggestions come along as "succulent" was being typed. Did I miss that? I would have thought that rather hitting the typo, you should have seen the "succulent" tag in the list so you could pick it directly.  I think that that's an important piece to go hand in hand with suggestions for literal text terms; the "tag:" prefix is just a gimme. And the facility for offering suggestions based that match anywhere in the suggestion rather than  just the prefix (so that typing "succ" would offer up, say, "unsuccessful" as well as "succulent" suggestions) would be helpful too.

Also: as you add new search terms. will it be easy to back out of them without losing the current state of the search box, as in, having added several terms, and after having typed several characters into the search box, can you pop over to the search term display and delete one, and have everything adjust?

OK, that was several things, but search is really important.

 

Link to comment
  • 3 months later...

Thanks a lot, @May L and @Ian Small -- looks great in general, but one very important feature of previous Evernote versions I can't discover in the video (I'm not a beta tester, so I can't check for myself if it's really missing): I miss the tag icon in the area above the results list, which calls up a scrollable list of all (!) tags that further narrow down the current search result.

full-list-of-tags.png.1b51fe2138de068a7c84e41318d63070.png

 

I rely heavily on this functionality in my Evernote-based information system. (In information science the underlying system is called "faceted classification", in retrieval accordingly "faceted search"). Getting a small selection of tags suggested, as shown in the video, is unfortunately not a solution, even if you get more tag suggestions by typing in the first letters. The reasons for this are:

  1. Often I don't even know which tags further subdivide a selected category of notes. It is an elementary function of the information system to tell me this.
     
  2. Sometimes I would like to get an overview of information about a preselection first -- for this I need to be able to see a complete list of available subcategories at a glance (which I can scroll down if too long).
     
  3. I usually click my way to the target by using the mouse: that is, I click on a category in the list of my main tags (or in the list of saved searches or favorites) and then click my way to the target via the list of narrow-down tags. I don't want to have to constantly switch between mouse and keyboard just to type the first letter of a tag that is otherwise not displayed.
     
  4. Generally, it is very annoying when software assumes that its AI is always smarter than the user. In other words: Wherever the user does not want to see an intelligent preselection but ALL options available, he should be enabled to do so.

In the hope that this functionality is preserved, here is a suggestion for improvement: The number in brackets after each tag in the narrow-down list should indicate the number of resulting search hits, not the total number of notes with that tag. This way, you could always see how far the selection of a particular tag would narrow-down the search results. (This type of display is actually standard in every professional information system that makes a faceted search possible.)

Link to comment
  • 2 months later...

@Oberdada Thank you for your feedback. We recently released a new filtering button on the new Evernote web. You can select multiple tags to filter. I agree with you that the number of results next to the tags would be helpful. We will see what we can do. Please let me know how you like this.

558450368_allnotesfiltering.thumb.PNG.83676a18992ed0d26ee82206901fba49.PNG 

  • Like 1
Link to comment

@May L: This is good news, thanks! As far as I can see it from the screenshot, it looks good for me. The new solution has the advantage that there are other filter criteria such as the modification date, which are now easily accessible (without having to master the Evernote search syntax).

The only downside seems to be that in the future I will need two mouse clicks instead of one to see the list of all tags. It would be important that at least we do not have to switch between mouse and keyboard to open the tag list.

Link to comment

It would be great to have the "Add Filters" option on more than just the "All Notes" view.  I would like the "Add Filters" option inside Notebooks as well.  Additionally, would like to search a text string and apply "Add Filters" to that seach.

Thanks for the continued improvement.  Greatly appreciated!

Link to comment

I agree with jdpeta,  adding  filter option would be great. I actually use it for personal use, but also for working. That is the reason it would be very good to have a filter option, so when I´m doing job´s things I filter for it, but when I´m doing personal things I can filter it too. By this way it all won´t mix up :) . I´m sure, as this video shows you keep on improving it day by day. We will be patient while we enjoy this useful tool.

------------------------

Ingeniero de instalaciones de domotica para viviendas y negocios

Link to comment
  • 1 year later...

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...