I heard about a new web service called Evernote.com on one of my favorite podcasts (this week in tech or TWIT). The site is still in beta but I wanted to try it out. I signed up for the beta and within a few hours had an invite in my inbox. The idea behind evernote is that it is a place to store your “brain” on the internet and then go back and search it later. Their tagline is to remember everything! Upload anything you want to store for later reference. Images, snipits of text from webpages or emails, text notes, and even audio can be stored on evernote. One think that made evernote interesting to me is their multiple client strategy. They have both PC and Mac clients. As well as a nice pure web interface and firefox plugin. They are also working on blackberry and iphone clients that are coming soon. This is important because often time you want to access this data from strange places.
The coolest thing about this service is their ability to scan and index all the data that you add as notes. So if you upload a digital photo of a receipt you can later automatically search for the text in the image and evernote will highlight it on the image. I am sure there are other online OCR apps but this is the first I have seen that does it well.
My first thought was that this would be a great place to store family history and genealogical data online. I immediately uploaded a bunch of family history pages I recently scanned at my Grandmother’s home. This included photos with names, newsletter articles, and pedigree sheets. About 60 high res images. I uploaded the images using their PC client and it took about 30 minutes to not only upload the images to the website but to also OCR all the text on the pages. If I had all my genealogy on this site I could easily search for any person, place or date and Evernote would show me all the documents I have that relate to this person (assuming there is some text associates with the photos). You can also manually tag images. Here is a few screenshots of a search I did for my grandfather Elwin (Pace).
Here is a pedigree file where I searched for James Pace. (Yes I do have second cousins in my tree! Paces on 2 sides.)
Here is a photo that shows it does pick up hand written text as well (searched for Paul). (Yes that is me on the right with my oh so hip 70s pants. I don’t think I was invited to be in the photo).
Now this is in beta, but here are the drawbacks. I did not that the OCR is only about 50-60% accurate. Surely not good enough for what we do on WVR. There are many places that I thought it should have picked up “Elwin” when I did the search (like the pedigree). Also it is hard to flip through the results. They just list every note in order that has your search results.
Next their tagging feature is very week. Facebook does that best at tagging photos (selecting an area on the photo to tie a tag to) and Evernote just does it at the noto (or photo) level. Lame! Also because some of the OCR is not correct I wish I could see how their software sees all the text and be able to fix it or add the text to anything they missed. So I could know for sure that everything was indexed correctly. This is a major drawback to this system.
All in all I think this site/software is very cool and as it improves should be very useful. Just the mobile aspects of this are amazing. Think about doing price comparisons at the store by just taking photos with your phone and mailing them to Evernote. Then going back and comparing all the prices and features. But I think it needs to have better OCR and indexing and a few more features before it is ready to be a serious tool (especially a genealogy tool).
