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.

Hector

@Paul. Thanks. I already tried the Alpha. It is very nice, but the highlite feature for PDF’s search is not there. It is really too bad. All my excitement fot nothing. I guess it is time to cancel my Premium subscription again.
http://darrencrawford.com Darren Crawford

I’ve scanned a few PDF’s from my MFPrinter and am not getting them to be searchable. They have been in the system for a day (for one) and several hours for the other.

One is a receipt from the UPS store (less than perfect scan) and the other is a document I received in the mail about my health coverage (which has lots of clean text)

Ideas?
Maxf

Awesome guys! Just keeps getting better and better! I’ve been eagerly awaiting this feature and now it’s arrived! I’m over the moon!
Rhodri

This appears to be a great feature – its a pity that the new version of evernote seems to crash on opening when used on a mac running 10.5.7 – any suggestions?
- Andrew Sinkov
  
  @Rhodri That sounds like a questions for our tech support: http://s.evernote.com/support
Shane

I’ve used adobe’s OCR and it was terrible. It got most words wrong on even the most legible of scans. How good is its accuracy? 90%? 95%?
http://forum.perfectelectroniccigarette.com/ E-Cigarette Forum

PDF support is a great addition. I have kind of been sitting on the sidelines checking out the service. Now that I know it has this feature I had to join. Keep up the great work.
Ernie

All this stuff about searching PDF is great, but I had a terrible time figuring out how to get a PDF into Evernote to begin with. I finally found the File|Import Wizard, but this is hardly easy. Isn’t there an easier way? (Using Windows XP/Vista)
- Andrew Sinkov
  
  @Ernie You can drag-n-drop PDFs into Evernote
Jen

Am I missing something? I just upgraded to Premium, and now my PDFs are searchable within Evernote. But how do I export them from my desktop version? I have the Mac desktop version. When I choose a note and try to export, the only options I have for file format are XML and HTML. How do I export a searchable PDF so that I can copy and paste the text?
- Andrew Sinkov
  
  @Jen To export a searchable PDF from the Evernote desktop versions, right click on the PDF in the note and select the option to save the searchable PDF. Our philosophy is always to default to the original content that you brought into Evernote. For this reason, the main PDF that will be in your note is the same PDF that you imported, but right-clicking will allow you to export the new, searchable version.
Jon

Andrew,

First, I love Evernote and have convinced/converted at least a dozen folks into the world of Evernote. Great podcasts too.

I am a premium user that upgraded primarily for the searchable PDF function. It doesn’t seem to work for handwritten notes scanned as PDF’s. Am I doing something wrong, or is this not a supported feature?

Thanks!
- Andrew Sinkov
  
  @Jon The new searchable PDF feature is optimized for scanned documents containing printed text.
Wil

I’m working this issue on the Evernote forum and can’t seem to get my pdf’s to become searchable. I do have a premium account. The wildcard here may be that the handwritten notes are coming from my Livescribe Pen, but I am exporting them as PDF’s within Livescribe and importing them into Evernote.
- Andrew Sinkov
  
  @Wil The PDF search feature is optimized for printed text–the kind that you would have if you scanned a document.

Evernote Logo

The Evernote Blog

The Evernote Blog