Suggestion: Search Simplified and Traditional Chinese characters

[boncat 3]

Hi Evernote

I am a supporter of Evernote.  This is my first time posting here.  Hope it will improve the users' experience using Evernote.

For Chinese language, there are basically two variants of character presentation.  

One is called Traditional Chinese and the other Simplified Chinese.  For example, people in Hong Kong and Taiwan use Traditional Chinese and Mainland China people use simplified Chinese.

Very often, Chinese users create notes from different sources of info, e.g. web pages, doc, pdf & etc, where there exists both Traditional and Simplified Chinese characters.

The problem is when searching is performed.  

For example, the Chinese name of "Internet" can be 互聯網 or 互联网.  They are in fact the same characters but in different presentation.  Since Evernote treats them as different characters, only one set of characters can search the note.  To users, it is very hard to tell if they should start searching by entering Traditional or simplified characters.

Suggestion: Similar to google search and other search engines, users simply enter whatever type of Chinese characters and search will locate the content regardless of Traditional or Simplified Chinese.  If this can be enhanced, it will be much easier to use.

[an_explorer 1]

It should be similar to Microsoft Word. One click to switch between Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese. 

[LaoZha 2]

I subscribe this suggestion: making EN able to locate the parts containing the traditional and simplified versions of the Chinese characters entered for the search.

I would consider this an essential feature for a program that boasts to be able to retrive any note.

The attached images shows what Google does when you search a Chinese word (in this case written in traditional character): it shows the sites containing the word written in traditional characters and also those containing the word written in simplified characters.

 

[florawang 0]

Yes most of the main stream search engines are quite smart on this. 

Google got an advance searching mode where you can specify you want Simplified Chinese only or Traditional Chinese only. But by doing a general search from its home page, you get reseach results returned in both of these two language variants (CHS + CHT). These two variants of characters got two different core encodings (GB2312 and BIG5), and I think the search engines store all of the web page caches and automatically convert them from one to the other. When a search request is made, the engines retrieve from just one language in its caches pool, but still present the results in their original language variants.

I assume it might be a bit of difficult for EVERNOTE to play like the search giants such as Baidu or Google, but a suggestion is that it could employs an automatic two-step search functionality. For example, when a Simplified Chinese search is made, search Simplified first, and then Traditional in the 2nd step. OH an API for character conversion might be needed. This is the challenge...

[louis925 0]

Disappear. I really hate Google when I search Traditional Chinese they give me Simplified Chinese result. Those are two different languages and should not be mixed.