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.

will

@Andrew Sinkov Is there any plan to make handwritten notes scanned in as PDFs searchable?
- Andrew Sinkov
  
  @Will if you are scanning in a handwritten note, my recommendation would be to scan it as an image file (JPG, PNG), this will give you the best recognition results. Some scanners allow you to create presets for different types of scans.
http://www.shepherdsnotes.com Drew Buell

I recently upgraded to a premium account and love it. I’ve spent the last couple of days adding over 600 different pdf’s, all of which are printed-text but none of them appear to be searchable as of yet. Do I need to turn any of these features on? Or, do I simply need to wait for your servers to finish annalyzing all of the data that I’ve uploaded (I’m almost at my 500 MB limit and it’s only been a couple days)?
Ralph Elliott

Evernote does not seem to be OCRing my PDFs in spite of the fact that I have a Premium account. What do you suggest we do?
- Andrew Sinkov
  
  @Ralph This sounds like a question for our support team: http://s.evernote.com/support
niceguy_iquest

I have a premium accout but i cannot search the pdfs I uploaded. Do I mis understand evernote?
thanks Doug
- Andrew Sinkov
  
  @niceguy_iquest The PDF Search feature is designed to make text-based PDFs searchable, such as scanned documents. The PDF Search feature is not designed to make images saved as PDFs searchable. Is that the type of PDF that you have?
John

Having trouble, as usual, with Evernote. I love Evernote, but I can’t ever get it to search PDFs in a useful way — is this just me? I just signed up for premium again, when I head about this. I have the (latest) Evernote for windows, a beta version (beta 3?) ver. 3.1.0.1212 (52487)

When I search it will bring up all of the PDF notes including that term…but all of the PDFs I have are 10-20 or more pages. How do I see the pages, beyond page 1, where the words are actually located in the PDF file? The only option I can see is opening the PDF in my PDF reader, which does not help since my PDF reader cannot search the PDFs (at least not the ones I’d like to search which are images). How do I get beyond page one? This will make my life so much easier. thanks!
- Andrew Sinkov
  
  @John If you right-click on the PDF, you will be given the option to Save the Searchable PDF. This will allow you to search within the PDF using your PDF viewer.
Boathead

Two questions re. using Evernote to create searchable pdfs using ScanSnap S1500:

1. Had the ability to search OCR’d scans announced in http://blog.evernote.com/2009/07/27/pdf-search/ been expanded to free accounts as well?

2. I have a full version of Acrobat 9 on my machine, but the contents of the scanned, and recognized, and searchable pdf aren’t visible from by Firefox browser. I can download and read with my browser, but hope to be able to view contents before downloading.

Thanks and Happy New Year to all,

BH
- Andrew Sinkov
  
  @Boathead The PDF Search feature is only available to Evernote Premium subscribers.
todd david

Can I get my pdf in my Evernotes as a note where I can view the document jsut like any other note or only as a link to the document where I have to open that link anytime I want to view that note, which is what I am trying to avoid.
thanks
Naoko Miki

I have a premium account but PDF search does not work (texts in the pdf document are in print and not hand-written). I see I am not the only one who is reporting this problem but none of the fellow users are receiving a straight-forward answer from you. You are evading the problem. Please tell me why this is not working. Thank you.
- Andrew Sinkov
  
  @Naoko, We’ll need a bit more information in order to diagnose the issue. Please contact our support team: http://s.evernote.com/support
Richard

Just received this from Support …

Is this true? and if so where does it mention this on the website?
Tks for any help ….
———————-

Hi Richard,

Unfortunately you are not going to see highlighted search terms in PDF on a windows computer. You will on a Mac, because the PDF abilities are built into the OS allowing us to do that. Sorry for any confusion. Evernote will find the note. If it is an image PDF and thus not available for searching with a PDF program, right click and save as searchable PDF, you can run a PDF search on that file.

Hope this Helps!
Thanks,
Larry
Evernote Support
- Andrew Sinkov
  
  Richard, this is true. As our support team says, the PDF Search feature will locate the PDF containing the keywords you are looking for, but, on Windows computers, Evernote is unable to highlight the specific instances of the found keyword.
  - Richard
    
    MMM..
    
    your page http://www.evernote.com/about/premium/
    does not mention this limitation – may I suggest that you make this clearer. It really would be useful if you could provide this feature.
  - Seanmac
    
    I have to agree with Richard here. A lot of my PDFs that I store in Evernot have over 20 pages. Have to actualy open the PDF in my local viewer and search then is another step I could really do without. Is there any plans to have a search within PDF inbedded in Evernote for Windows. This would be awesome!
    
    Johnny
  - Igor
    
    I have moved to pro for exactly this reason and now there is no highlighting in the WIN Version. This is not what I have expected as there is no clear mentioning of this fact on your page. Is there a way to get back to the free Version?
http://www.ecigcart.org/ electronic cigarette forum

Yes this is really great. I am also using the premium features of Evernote. It really helps for me.

Is there any additional features for this?

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