New Premium Feature: PDF Search

Product updates | 27 Jul 200927 Jul 09 | By Andrew Sinkov

86 comments

Ever since launch, our lab coat-wearing R&D team has been working those slide rules and protractors to improve Evernote’s search technology. We’re excited to unveil our new premium-only feature: PDF search.

What’s new?

There are two types of PDFs in the world: those that are searchable and those that aren’t. Most scanners produce PDFs that are essentially digitized images of a physical page. In the past, these PDFs would not appear in your search results. Starting now, Evernote will run these PDFs through our updated recognition servers, allowing our Premium subscribers to find them when they search.

In addition, our desktop versions will allow premium users to export the searchable PDFs by right clicking on them in the note.

What about old PDFs?

Over the next week, Evernote will process all existing premium user PDFs. Don’t worry, newly added PDFs will become searchable within minutes, though it may take a bit longer while our servers crunch through existing ones.

What if a PDF is already searchable?

If you already have searchable PDFs in your account, Evernote won’t touch them. This is true for all subscribers, free and premium.

What’s next?

The longer you use Evernote, the more critical our super-duper search technology becomes. Rest assured that we’re going to keep on improving it so you’ll never forget a thing.

Evernote Premium

There are lots of great reasons to go premium:

Create 500MB of new notes each month
Sync any type of file
Allow others to view and edit your notebooks
Get faster image recognition

And lots more. Check out all the benefits on our premium page.

Jonathan Smith

Will this search handwritten notes? I’d love to take handwritten notes on my iPad, export them to evernote and have them searchable. I’m not a premium user, but I think this would “turn” me! Keep up the great work!
- Leo O
  
  Same for me. I’m a heavy user of Goodnotes to take handwritten class notes and I’d love them to be searchable. but I can only export in PDF, not as an image.
  I don’t want simply recognition and conversion because I like to keep them like that, with all the drawing I do on the side, but I want them searchable and taggable.
http://www.pdfssearch.com PDF

Nice but you can also try http://www.pdfssearch.com

Find view and download PDF Files.
http://ultrabookworm.co.cc Honoloeloe

I use

http://ultrabookworm.co.cc

It finds PDF files and ebooks in open directories with alot of other stuff to download!
KilianK

Would you be able to tell me why search result highlighting is only available on Mac? This is the one thing that got me excited about this feature, but I’m not able to use it (yet). Why?
- Andrew Sinkov
  
  PDF support is built into Mac OS. This is not the case with Windows. In Windows, we need to incorporate PDF tools into our application. This adds significant complexity. We’re looking into options that might add the PDF search functionality.
- JazzyJ
  
  I too am disappointed after watching the video and trying this on my Windows 7 machine. I even upgraded to premium out of desperation to see this feature work. Come on guys!
- Sylwia Bialczak
  
  Yeah, I hope it will be done soon. Works in Mendeley, so it is not like it is impossible. And you should clearly say it is Mac only feature not premium feature.
  - K
    
    Doesn’t look like EverNote cares too much for it’s now OCTOBER and there is still no PDF highlighting.
    
    If anything they should update their website to cleary state that feature is MAC only so as not to be considered FALSE advertising…
Keith

I have a fairly simple question but one that I haven’t been able to find a definitive answer on.

I am currently a free user and plan on upgrading to premium once I’ve really decided I want to permanently use Evernote. If I upload a PDF now as a free user, I understand it will not be searchable. However, once I have upgraded to premium, will the PDFs that I uploaded as a free user then become searchable after resyncing or would they need to be reuploaded entirely?

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