Why normal searching in Evernote feels broken
When I first typed something into the Evernote search bar, I thought I was going to get a clean list of the exact notes I wanted. Instead it was like opening a junk drawer. Tags, half finished meeting notes, random clipped webpages — all jammed together. If you name your notes casually like I do, with things like “draft final final v2” and “grocery test,” you’ll never find them again unless you figure out the search operators. I actually lost a note that only had three words in it because Evernote happily gave me 40 unrelated ones just because they all shared one word. At that point I realized I had to stop relying on the plain text field and actually learn what Evernote calls search operators.
Using notebook operator when everything collapses
One morning, I went to search a recipe that I had carefully saved in my “Kitchen Notes” notebook. Instead of showing me that exact note, Evernote pulled recipes scattered across my “Misc” notebook, my “Travel Planning” notebook, and even one inside a PDF about hotels. That was the moment I learned about the notebook operator. The syntax is `notebook:”Kitchen Notes”` and it tells Evernote to only look inside that notebook. Without the quotes, it won’t work if your notebook has more than one word in the title. I actually wasted half an hour once just because I left out the quotes and kept getting zero results. The screen doesn’t give you a helpful error message — it just stares at you like nothing exists. 😛
How intitle makes searches actually usable
There was a meeting note that I named “Quarterly Budget Ideas” but buried inside were a lot of words like income, expense, table. If I searched “budget,” Evernote threw me basically half my library. Then I stumbled on `intitle:` which solved my problem. By typing `intitle:budget` it specifically filtered notes with “budget” only in the title. I swear this is the only way to reliably pull up my planning notes because I keep shoving random screenshots inside notes that say totally unrelated things. The moment I tried `intitle:project` I uncovered stuff I thought I had lost forever. Worth remembering — it will not read subtitles or headings inside the note, only the actual top-level title line that you typed when naming the note.
Filtering attachments with resource operators
Sometimes I just want that one PDF with an old invoice. The mess started when my Evernote account filled with everything from clipped recipes to scanned receipts. Typing invoice gave me some notes with the word invoice in text, some with clipped email confirmations, and even my landlord’s entire rental agreement. What actually worked was using the `resource:application/pdf` operator. That specifically grabs notes with a PDF inside, not just the word. If you do images instead, you can use `resource:image/jpeg`. That way you can filter down to what you really want. It is not obvious on the interface at all. There is no dropdown to select “files only” which I kept looking for. You just type it directly like some secret cheat code.
Combining multiple operators to zero in
Eventually my searches needed more precision. For example, finding a scanned tax document that was definitely in the notebook “Finance 2022” and probably had the word IRS. The combo looked like this: `notebook:”Finance 2022″ intitle:IRS resource:application/pdf`. The first time I ran that search nothing appeared, but it turned out the note title didn’t actually have IRS in it. I had to drop intitle and just keep `IRS` as a normal word in the query. It taught me to try different mixes rather than assume the note is titled the way I remembered it. Another trick is joining operators with `any:` which means OR, not just AND. So `any: intitle:laptop intitle:computer` gets you both.
Working around the date search frustration
This one still annoys me. I tried to grab all notes created last week. My instinct was to click some filter like most apps, but the only way was typing `created:20240101 -created:20240107` which means after January 1st but before January 7th. Except Evernote requires the date in that precise yearmonthday format. I learned that the hard way because I kept typing slashes like 2024/01/01 and Evernote refused silently, returning nothing. It didn’t even throw an error. There’s also an `updated:` operator for notes you changed within a timeframe, which is handy when you swear you edited something but it slipped away into the void. Honestly, I end up writing the dates in a sticky note on my monitor so I don’t forget the formatting.
Tag searches when you cant remember titles
Tags are supposed to help, but most of my tags are just one-off experiments like “urgent” or “downloadlater.” Still, when I remembered to consistently tag notes, I could narrow stuff instantly with `tag:recipe` or `tag:urgent`. The sneaky thing is if you have multiple tags on a note, you can search like `tag:urgent tag:work` to only get the overlap. For me that uncovered two lonely notes that had both. Without operators, searching urgent just gave me notes with the word urgent written in some random clipping, which is not what I needed. The tag filter is laser-focused on your own tags, which feels like one of the few reliable systems inside the chaos.
Saving common operator searches for sanity
After writing the same operators a hundred times, I realized you can save searches. In the desktop app, once you run a search you like, you hit “Save Search” and it appears in your left panel. I use this for repeating needs like `notebook:”Kitchen Notes” intitle:recipe resource:image/jpeg`. That pulls the food notes with pictures so I don’t have to reinvent the query. The funny part is if you later rename your notebook, the saved search breaks. It doesn’t magically update. I found this out the painful way when I renamed “Kitchen Notes” to “Cooking Ideas” and then everything returned zero results until I rewrote the operator. Little things like this make me wish Evernote gave visual cues about what’s happening under the hood, but at least the operators hold steady once you know their quirks.
Other small operators that feel like secrets
A couple of extra ones I stumbled into by accident: `todo:true` shows all notes with completed checkboxes, while `todo:false` brings up unchecked ones. This rescued me when I embedded too many to do lists across different projects. There is also `source:web.clip` which limits results to notes you clipped from the browser. That’s perfect when you know you saved an article but don’t remember which one. Each time I unlock one of these, it feels like I’m discovering a hidden settings panel that should have been obvious but wasn’t. Honestly I’ve half convinced myself the operators exist because Evernote engineers got tired of writing proper UI filters. Either way, they’re quicker than scrolling through thousands of notes manually. 🙂
Putting it together without losing your mind
The only sane way I use Evernote now is to keep a scratchpad note with examples of queries I don’t want to forget. Something like:
“`
notebook:”Kitchen Notes” intitle:pasta
resource:application/pdf tag:finance
created:20240101 -created:20240107
“`
I copy paste from there instead of trying to hold the syntax in my brain. It looks messy, but the time saved compared to fumbling in the UI is massive. And the moment something isn’t working, I know to check the quotes first, because at least half the time it’s that silly missing quote breaking the whole thing ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯