(Archived) Reverse Search Highlighting

[robdbirch 5]

Is there some way to reverse the search highlighting? I really don't care much at all where the key words are in the document. I only care which documents have the key word(s) I typed into the search. I seriously dislike that when the document has this transparent black over the whole document other than the key words. I can't quickly read it clearly, i have to click in the document to make the somewhat transparent black disappear. Do you really need to show me how good your search is by just highlighting the key words and blacking out the rest of the document? I trust your search works reasonably well! So please let me get to my content quickly! Just, lightly highlight the key words, or let the users choose how dark they wish to highlight.

Thanks in advance for any help.

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

I also strongly dislike how the Search highlight works. It works just the opposite of every other search engine I have ever used.

I would prefer for ONLY the Search text to be highlighted with a user-specified background color (like yellow, bright green, bright pink, etc), just like all other Search engines. It makes it very hard to read and analyze the surrounding text when all non-search text is covered with a dark grey layer.

This issue has been raised many times. I have not seen anyone who prefers the way it is currently done.

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

It never really bothered me to have a gray background and white highlighting, to be honest. On the iPhone, we have bright yellow, but the highlighted text is enlarged a bit, so it obscures the adjacent letters. It's not a big deal, but if I had to choose, I'd say I prefer the Mac implementation to it. I'll have to pay more attention to how Google an others do it.

[robdbirch 5]

The point would be not whether you like it or not, it's whether it's function and form serve a productive and effective purpose. I can only determine this search implementation being effective and purposeful for a few corner cases. Search is well researched and widely implemented. I am sure there are some usability studies somewhere?

If I remember correctly Google allows you to configure the option in your search settings I believe you can also select the color. When Google had a tool bar (do they still have one?) there was a button to turn it off and on. In some text mining tools I have used they would highlight the term one color and the coreferences in another.

Thanks for the responses

[GrumpyMonkey 4,319]

Thanks for bringing up the issue! Like I said, it never really stood out for me until you mentioned it.

I don't know if search highlighting can be productive in and of itself. To measure its effectiveness, we'd have to know the desired result, and for other users, I think they also want to locate the search terms, so it looks like we have at least two desired results here: you just want the document, and some users want both the document and the terms. I think we'll have to agree to disagree about the current implementation being only good for corner cases, because it seems to me that it is well-suited for the second use case. At least, at has worked well for me so far.

In an ideal world, perhaps, the default highlighting behavior would be determined by extensive usability studies, and we'd also have a rich set of user options to change the behavior (especially useful for users with eyesight issues). I 'm one of those people who prefer a lot of choices, but I suspect there are significant issues involved with scaling behavior across platforms. Having a handful of choices would be a better way to go forward, in my opinion.

Google's implementation (whatever it is) is probably the expected behavior for new users, so I also think looking at that would be a good place to start if Evernote decides to modify the feature.

[robdbirch 5]

Correct, there are two main tasks

1. Document Search
   
2. Word Search
   

Evernote has coupled the two, a corner case.

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

So, particularly for Case #1, Document Search, having the Note Content with transparent black over the whole document other than the key words makes the Note much harder to read. When I do a Search that returns a number of Notes, I need to quickly and easily click on the Note list to quickly read/scan each Note.

I guess I just don't see any benefit to covering the Note Content with transparent black over the whole document.

If ONLY the Search terms are highlighted then we can both read the entire document as well as quickly see where the Search terms are in the document.

[dlu 628]

Thanks for posting, been noted

[dlove100 0]

I too find the dark shading of notes highly annoying. This is my only real gripe about EN (ok, I wish there was a date reminder feature too).

I primarily use the keyword search just to find the right document and not to find the actual search word. Therefore, highlighting the word and blackening out the document to the point that it is unreadable makes it difficult to actually see which document it is I want.

I'm not sure why EN employees keep noting this annoyance (for a couple of years now) but still no changes.

[quackmd 7]

In contrast, i find the search highlighting productive since most of my notes are actual book pages. i guessed you removed that feature in the iOS. Please dont remove it in the future version of OSX or please make it an option. And if you could bring it back to iOS then it would be better, or make it an option at least.

[Gandalf99 1]

I would like to vigorously agree with the complaint about the search highlighting in EN. In order to read the found notes, I have to unhighlight them. This is not ideal, but is tolerable for short notes (<1 screenful) with one ocurrence of the search term. But for any note that extends beyond 1 screen, once you have unhighlighted, you have to do a Find in order to see where the term appears in the note. This is a colossal waste of time—the option to use normal highlighting behavior (mark all ocurrences of the search term with yellow or some other color) while still being able to read the note would be GREATLY appreciated. As others have pointed out, virtually every other search—whether in apps or websites do not make the rest of the document unreadable.

[Jackolicious 808]

Totally understood.

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

Thanks for posting, been noted

 

 

Totally understood.

 

Hi Jack.  Now that both you and DLU [1 year ago] have acknowledged our concern/issue with the DARK overlay of all text, any chance you guys might actually make a change to fix it?  I'm sure you will acknowledge it is HIGHLY NON-STANDARD method of highlighting text which is found.

 

Thanks.

[kcRush 0]

understand well