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You can put all the fancy bells, whistles, sharing abilities and ridiculous features you want on an app, but sometimes all that matters is a strong search backbone. (Just look at Yahoo earnings last week for further proof and discussion.)
Evernote appears to have realized this early on already.
Following up some retooling on its servers for faster syncing, the productivity app maker has switched up its search blueprint and introduced Descriptive Search.
The new approach, at least for the note-taking app, is designed to enable users to use natural, even colloquial, language to search for notes as he or she might remember saving them.
Essentially, Descriptive Search rummages throughout an Evernote account from top to bottom, meaning notebooks, tags, devices, online sources for Evernote clippings, and more.
That could mean searching based on one (or all) of the following: the date the note was saved, the device it was saved on, the geographical location of where it was saved, or by other documents that might be attached to the note.
The Redwood City, Calif.-based company provided the following search phrase examples:
- "Notebook project with PDFs," which searches all notes in a project notebook with PDFs attached
- "Web clips created last month" or "web clips last month," which searches all web pages clipped the previous month
- "Notes from Japan" or "in Japan," which searches all notes created while in Japan
- "Notes from phone with audio" or "phone with audio," which searches all notes created on a phone with an attached audio file or recording
All in all, the search improvements should mean producing faster and better results from what could be hundreds of notes (or even notebooks) with the goal of making the user's experience more efficient and productive in the long run.
Descriptive Search is now available on Evernote Mac in English only for the time being.