Google CEO, Eric Schmidt’s presentation at this week’s TechCrunch Disrupt conference really caught our attention. Talking about the growing importance of serendipity for saving people’s time, he said, “The next step in search is a move towards more personal results.” We’re on the same page, Mr. Schmidt, which is why today we’re excited to launch a new version of our Google Chrome Extension with a powerful new feature called Simultaneous Search.
Simultaneous Search
Simultaneous Search lets you search both Google and your Evernote account at the same time. All you do is type your Google search as you normally would and that same search will be performed in your Evernote account. The Google search results appear as usual, with the addition of a line displaying the number of matching Evernote notes. The same number is also displayed in a badge over the Evernote Extension icon. Clicking on the extension shows a list of all your notes that matched the search.
Searching has never been more personal.
Why this is very cool
I’ll admit to being a bit skeptical about this feature at first. But after a few minutes of having it in my browser, I saw the light. You will be shocked at how frequently you perform Google searches for things that are already saved in Evernote. There’s an amazing sense of serendipity when you realize that you can skip scouring the web because you already have what you’re looking for.
Also, seeing the results together adds a level of context and personal value that the searches may not have on their own.
The same feature also works in some other Google sites, including Google Images and Google Shopping.
How to activate Simultaneous Search
There are two ways to activate Simultaneous Search. There’s a checkbox in the Evernote extension settings and a checkbox on the login screen of the extension. The feature is OFF by default, so you’ll need to check one of those boxes. Also, you must be signed into Evernote for the feature to work. So, if you do a search for something that you know is in your Evernote account and no badge appears, it’s probably because you aren’t signed in. Just sign in by clicking on the extension.
On Chrome first
This feature is currently available only for Google searches performed in the Google Chrome Browser. We’re looking into expanding this functionality to other search engines and browsers. Let us know what you think.
Emailing your clips
We’ve added a nice social feature in this update, as well. You can now email your clips to up to ten friends right from inside the Evernote Extension popup. As with any clips, you can always add some text to give your recipients some context.
Get the Evernote Chrome Extension now »
Please note, Google Chrome extensions update automatically, but if you don’t want to wait, download it from Google now.
64 Comments
Randell
Great idea. Too bad it doesn’t work.
I made sure I had the latest version of Chrome and upgraded the Evernote extension. I checked the activation checkbox within the extension. I even rebooted Chrome. I tried a regular Google search and a Google Image search. However, I never did see the badge update or the number of searches appear anywhere on the page. I even performed a search on the Evernote desktop client then copied the keywords into Google and did the search. Did you guys test this???
Andrew Sinkov
Make sure to give it a moment or two to load the Evernote results.
Justin
This sounds like a great idea, but not a great implementation. The goal seems to be providing a unified place to search both the web and Evernote, but the results don’t show up in one place. You perform a search, and the little box says you have matches in Evernote. Then you click the link, a new tab opens for Evernote, you sift through the matches, see if anything is what you want, and if it doesn’t, you close the tab and go back to the Google results and try to find something relevant there. To be useful, there needs to be a way to show Evernote results on the same page as the Google results. Otherwise, this is about as useful as a link at the top saying “Bing also has matches for your search!”.
Andrew Sinkov
Justin, that’s an interesting suggestion. Clicking on the extension itself brings up a popup with your Evernote results.
I don’t entirely agree with your Bing analogy. Google results and Evernote results are inherently different things. One represents the a look outward into the world, the other a look inward into things of personal value and importance. Showing the two together adds a lot of context to the search you’re performing.
Justin
Ooh, I hadn’t tried the extension button to get the popup. I definitely like that better than the main link that takes you away from the current page. I think my main gripe is having to leave the current page to evaluate the Evernote search results. Perhaps Bing was a bad example, but I still think the current implementation is essentially a message saying “hey, did you consider looking somewhere else for this?”
If the main link had behavior similar to the extension button, I think that’d be awesome. Better yet, if the top x results (user selectable) were shown in place of the link, along with a “x more matches” button to expand the Evernote results on the page, I think this feature would be perfect! Maybe the EN results could have a green background to make a clear distinction between Google and EN results.
Hopefully this stuff doesn’t sound too nit-picky. I actually think the idea is great and would just like to see a little smoother integration.
Stephen
I agree with Justin, I was hoping to see the results in the same google result window. Having to go to Evernote to see if any of the results are applicable to what I’m searching for is inconvenient, but it does serve as a good reminder to jog my memory that I clipped something that I’m searching for. So as long as I remember “Oh yeah I think I put this in Evernote!”… but it would be much cooler to say “Oh good, this note is what I was looking for on Google! Score!”
sldx
Exactly. It’s not at all useless, it’s quite great actually to see your evernote results with your google searches.
But you see, speed is one of the reasons I like evernote, results are just there. And now google has Instant, which would work just great with evernote. Like, show the number of results in realtime, with the option to drop down the results. Maybe have the LOCAL evernote app do the real searching, not server side.
Or, get much better servers
Anyway, great work guyz, the future is awesome
Aaron
Works great for me. No update, upgrade, or reboot required.
Thanks EN, great idea!
Trond
Nice feature. Unfortunately, I much prefer evernote on firefox despite this:
1) The chrome version has never worked for me. I’ve never been able to log in. The newest edition does give a clue, “turn on third party cookies”. If I do this, I lose the little privacy I have and can be tracked across web sites… so this is something I’m not willing to do.
2) Log in once a week would be a major hassle. I have a good, generated password so I don’t know it by heart and never will.
Philip Constantinou
Hi Trond -
If you don’t want to turn of 3rd party cookies you can also log in directly at http://www.evernote.com. Once you’ve logged into Evernote the Chrome extension will work great. If you log out of Evernote web app, you’re also logging out of the extension.
Brian
Thanks for the tip! I had the same issue, this worked for me.
Ravi Advani
Worked great for me with no other tweaks needed. Great idea EN!
Anthony
There are not many times these days that I say to myself “Cooool” but I just did! It didn’t appear to update automatically so I went to the extensions website and installed. The first few searches didn’t show any evernote results, but after a couple of minutes, they came through. It takes about 5 seconds for the results to display. Would be good to show a ’0′ if no results can be found, just to confirm evernote has looked…
Would also be good if the ‘email clips’ saved email addresses or looked them up in gmail / outlook (configurable?). I’d like this in the client as well…
Andrew Sinkov
Thanks for the suggestions.
Lars
Everybody: It takes up to five minutes before the first Evernote result shows up. I guess they have to crank a special handle somewhere
After that it takes about a blink of an eye.
Just be patient, it works!
Hannah
Very cool! I look forward to the firefox version because I too much prefer to use evernote from there. But it really is a great idea, evernote keeps getting better.
Glenn Tarcea
I just tried it. This is fantastic! I love all the tweaks and features being added across the different platforms!
James Taylor
Nice idea. As with other features in the Chrome extension, I’d love it if it were linked with local rather than online Evernote; i.e. that clicking the link took me to results within Evernote for Windows.
A further awesome step for Google/Evernote would be for Google Desktop Search to also search within local Evernote, displaying Evernote notes as well as other local file and also email results! That would be awesome!
Tony
That is a good idea, I got it.
If it can be work in other search engine, like bing.com, or yahoo search, that will be great.
Justin
D’oh…another painful quirk: The Evernote link pops up right where the top result or “did you mean to search…” links are and bumps the whole page a bit, so if you quickly go to click a result, the Evernote link pops up, moves everything below it, and you end up going somewhere other than the link you intended.
Event Connections
This is a great feature. As a long time Evernote user, I’m sure it will be very resourceful. I love Chrome, although I still find myself using Firefox since I like the add-ons better. Hope Firefox extension is in the works.
Ingo
It’s nice to get back just a little bit of the functionality we lost when you stopped supporting Google Desktop Search.
Of course, that worked much better than this and didn’t rely on browser plugins… and since I use Firefox far more than Chrome still, this is just a tiny step back to what we lost.
JB Chappell
Any plans to develop this extension on Mozilla Firefox?
markus
Why develop for Chrome when Firefox has 8x the userbase plus the APIs available for developing an extension in FF are a lot more flexible and….existing
Philip Constantinou
Hey Markus -
The Evernote Mozilla Add-On (ie Evernote Firefox extension) is a bit of a beast. It’s got native Mac, Windows and JavaScript all built into one. On top of that, we’ve supported Firefox 3.0-3.7 and we’ve even got support for some Thunderbird functions. All that means that the development, testing, deployment and release cycles are comparatively slow and involved. JavaScript on Chrome has been an ideal rapid development environment for us — new features are added quickly, it’s much more of a write once run everywhere environment. Chrome auto-updates daily so we don’t do a lot of testing on old versions.
In short, it’s much better for Evernote to build and stabilize features in Chrome and then port them to Firefox.
William Reynolds
Philip, you should consider porting this Chrome extension to a Firefox Jetpack. Just like Chrome extensions, Jetpacks are Javascript based so it’s quick to develop and release: https://jetpack.mozillalabs.com/
The Add-ons builder makes developing Jetpacks even easier: https://builder.mozillalabs.com/
Patrick Mackaaij
I also figured and noticed I already have a lot of knowledge in Evernote and tend to find it again via Google since that looks faster. Very good idea and interesting to see how this evolves.
Maybe you can stretch this idea a bit further and also support searches with for instance the “site:” operand in Google Search to support searches like “site:blog.evernote.com”. I know I can go to the site and then click the Evernote button but this just seems more like the thing I’d do.
Peter Brummelkamp
Nice…However :
I have been using the standard search possibilities of Chrome.
Look for options and manage search engines.
Add a new one. Name is Evernote, search is Evernote and the URL is http://www.evernote.com/search?q=%s
When you type “evernote” and TAB in the address bar, you can type your search-item and ENTER and Chrome searches in your Evernote !
Andrew Sinkov
Peter, this is a great tip. It’s super convenient.
Steve K.
Great idea! I use Chrome almost exclusively these days and it’s great to see all the incremental improvements to the Evernote plug-in. It really adds value to Evernote and Chrome.
Alex
Nice job guys.
mark
cool. Unfortunately I will not use it until you make firefox extention.
Kermit
This is cooooooooooooooool !
Steen
Great idea. Evernote just got 100% more effective.
Frank
The german translation of the EN extension settings (“When enabled, your Google searches will also be performed …”) is actually not understandable. You used the google translator, right? Bad idea. You should change it, it’s awkward right now.
My suggestion:
“Wenn diese Funktion aktiviert ist, wird Ihre Google-Suche auch in Ihrem Evernote-Account durchgeführt. Die Ergebnisse werden durch eine Ziffer auf dem Erweiterungssymbol angezeigt.”
Dmitry Stavisky
Thank you. We changed the translation.
Frank
I thank you.
Alan Neese
Nice job guys! Can you search from a specific folder in Evernote from Google?
Oli
Here’s hoping for a Safari 5 extension
Barry
Yes, yes. Listen to Oli. He makes a lot of sense
I almost switched over to Chrome for the EN integration, but other apps (1password, Things) pull me back to Safari. I want the best of both worlds. That’s not asking for much, right?
Nathan
Cool. I’d love if it searched Evernote from Gmail, too (optionally, at least). When I’m looking for a random bit of text, I often can’t remember whether I put it in Evernote or sent an email to myself.
Zylun Staffing
This will be great. Chrome extensions have been very helpful thus far. When will the firefox version be coming out?
Thanks.
D&G Sunglasses
It also has worked great for me. No upgrade, or reboot was needed.
Thanks – James
Jimmy
Are there any plans to include the “Add Page to Evernote as PDF” functionality that is available with the Safari plugin? I use this in Safari regularly and honestly it is the only thing keeping me from making Chrome my default browser.
Thanks.
Saskia
This is one of the best feature updates I’ve seen in a long time, it added something I’ve been wishing for for ages. I have a lot of notes & have been using Evernote for a long time so always forget whether I might have saved something in Evernote in the past. I tend to just Google things if I’m not sure whether it’s in EN, so this fits right in with my usual behaviour. Thanks for the tip about clicking on the extension icon for the results, as I did agree with a previous poster that it’s a bit annoying to have to load up another page to see what the EN results actually are (sometimes they will all be completely irrelevant so this ends up being a bit of a waste of time). Perhaps you should make the fact that the results are available via the icon a bit clearer?
If I were to suggest a couple of improvements, I’d say:
- give us the option to go to the desktop app rather than the webapp (would be particularly nice if there were two links, one for the webapp & one for the desktop app, so that we can choose on a case-by-case basis. I don’t always have EN open so sometimes I’d want to just open it in the browser)
- If possible, speed up the process a little bit; sometimes I click on the first search result without thinking and the Evernote result pops up just as I’m doing this so I accidentally get taken to the EN results.
Thanks Evernote!
Holger Durer
Nice idea. Too sad it doesn’t work for me. I waited a few minutes and still don’t get anythings (and yes, I *am* logged in to Evernote).
BTW: Why is this only for Google and not for other useful search engines? (duckduckgo, yahoo, bling, …)
Also: Can’t you give any visual feedback if a user is not logged in? A negative result is fairly meaningless if it means “not logged in or no results for that search”.
Holger Durer
One day and a browser restart later it now suddenly works.
But why does it open a new tab/window rather than just replacing the google result page just as the regular google results would do?
Brandon
It worked for me, with a slight delay. Perhaps you could have the option to expand the results without forcing the user to click through to a separate page. Or, as was mentioned, show the top 5 results from Evernote right away.
Next steps would be to let me click through to my desktop version of Evernote if I’m on the computer w/ it installed. I’d rather go there than the web version.
Also need results quicker in line with Instant search. It seems a new phrase or term searched doesn’t show up unless I hit enter (which is no longer needed w/ Google instant)
Tom
Great idea but very annoying.
As there is a delay in the Evernote results and causes the Google search results to be bumped down. Would be nice if it showed on the side with the other Google search options.
Mobile Marketing Max
I have used Evernote for everything under the sun but now this extension makes me even happier – thank you! As someone whose work is encompassed in the Internet and full of research, having the ability to check through my evernotes as well is a real help.
Love you guys!
Brad Carvey
I had some problems getting the extension to work. I logged into my Evernote account and everything worked.
I have only just started using it and the delay doesn’t seem like a problem. As I review the regular results, the Evernote icon with the number of results pops up.
This is great. I don’t normally use Chrome, but I will try it because of this extension.
Jenny
I never leave comments for any blogs just to tell them how much I love their product. I am in Marketing for a mobile company and I always loathe the negative feedback and crave the positive. I wonder how many people out there just like me love our product but forget to tell us.
well, this is my positive feedback karma. I LOVE this new feature. I have already used it probably 25 times and it has taken the pain out of copying and pasting a screenshot + the url link which is what I was doing previously. I love how easy it is to save web pages to my notebook with a simple click. I’m a big user in chrome (I think most techies are), and I think starting with Chrome is a great idea.
I think this is one of the coolest features of Evernote and one that people might pay for all on it’s own. You could also add the ability to email the page to a friend and save it to your notebook at the same time and eventually maybe share the page and have all your friends be able to comment on it.
Chris Bailey
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE
I didn’t check but this plea is probably somewhere in these comments:
Integrate Evernote content into desktop search – either Google’s or Windows. My world would be so much better!
Thanks for listening.
CB
Mike
Would really like to see this work in Bing, and other search engines also.
Michael
I’d really like to see the features like simultaneous search added to the Safari add-on. Even a separate Safari 5 extension that added that feature would be great.
Benjaloo
What about re-adding Google Desktop Search compatibility? I know there is a plugin architecture for GDS, and thic capability was present in an earlier version of Evernote.
This would help those of us who know we have a piece of info locally (not on the web), and aren’t sure whether we saved it in Evernote, or got emailed a file, or whatever.
It’s one of the reasons I’ve not jumped more fully into using Evernote.
ed
Why does the Chrome extension not clip locally? Firefox and Safari extensions work perfectly, but Chrome’s extension is a real nuisance… I’ve migrated to chrome like tens of millions of others as it’s just a better browser. Why the usability difference? I hope it gets fixed soon….
Andrew Sinkov
Ed there are differences in what browsers allow us to do. That’s why our Chrome extension is different from Safari.
David Corbacho
I hope you get this feature soon in Firefox
ilima shima
Please add this to Firefox. Thanks for the great work!
IT Outsourcing
I started using chrome but still cant drop firefox for it’s useful plug-ins. I hope chrome will allow those plug-ins in their version soon…thanks
PilotBob
This is nice.. however, I would love to see the matches in the chrome location bar drop down just as you do for matches in your book marks…. I rarely go to the google page any more.
BOb
Bry
Come on guys. Please put out a firefox extension with simultaneous search. Its killing me since I switched back to ff5 from chrome.
Its been a whole year!
Amandangeline
It’s really great article. I would like to appreciate your work and would like to tell to my friends.