Evernote 5 is here

Posted by dan7000
Oct 9, 2013 at 04:20 PM

Paul Korm wrote:

>
>22111 wrote:
>>- But let’s say you have 10,000 items, then EN must be a nightmare?
> >Yes, I’d think it would be. Evernote is not the tool for that kind of
>volume, or for the other features you mention.

I have 9,000 notes, about a third of which contain PDF, Word, or image attachments. If you talk to people on the EN forums you will find lots of people with far more notes than that.

I think this type of volume is *exactly* what EN is built for. I’ve never used another piece of software, other than Gmail, that can quickly and easily retrieve content out of such a large database—especially considering that unlike Gmail, EN searches the *content* of PDFs, Word files and images. So in my experience, it’s far from a nightmare - I don’t know what other tool I could use for this if EN did not exist.

The fact is, hierarchical organization is terrific for creating outlines of books or papers or other specific topics: when you are dealing with one specific topic that will have a couple hundred sub-items, all of which logically fit in a hierarchical structure.

But hierarchy does not scale.
How do you search the internet? With a hierarchical tree navigation structure? Remember, Yahoo! tried that in the 90s and it became unusable very quickly. No, you search the internet using Google. You search content and metadata using search terms. That’s the way you deal with large volumes of information—so far, it’s the only way that works.
Same thing with big content databases: big data doesn’t use hierarchical databases, because it doesn’t scale. It uses relational databases which, again, you search using search fields.
Of course it’s useful to be able to group search results into convenient buckets for future reference. Big content databases always allow some type of “binder” or “tags” so you can tag data or drop it into a “binder” or “folder” and then later find this discrete group of documents. Google doesn’t facilitate that type of structure. But EN does: both with tags and with saved searches. For instance, I have an EN notebook called “people” for people I don’t need in my permanent contact list. And then I have project-based tags. Then I have a saved search for “people in

.” Click on that and I have a nice, project-based contact list. And any new people I can just drag their contact information into EN and tag it with the project name and they automatically show up in that saved list.