>However, the real brilliance of Evernote was its search functionality
I'm surprised this is supposed to be a selling point. Search has rarely found what I am looking for and I almost always have to go hunt for the note I am looking for manually. I've even been known to export all my notes as plain text files and use an external program (even the OS!) to search for something I'm looking for.
Frankly I've had so many many problems with Evernote. The synching is terrible. I can't tell you how many times I've been working on a lengthy note when it will try to synch and have a problem and it will trash everything I've written since the last synch and revert the note back to what it was before. This has happened to me so many times that I've started to write my notes in other apps and then copy and paste the text to Evernote when I am finished.
I've tried other note taking apps, but they all have problems of one sort of another. My ideal note app would have the following features:
* The ability to export all of the notes with the click of one button to plain text Markup files. Ideally any folder structure within the note app would be maintained and the notes would be zipped up and could be either saved locally or emailed to me. I have seen so many cloud services go up in flames suddenly that I have less than zero trust in cloud services. I want my data to be available in a format that I could easily move it to another service and I can back it up locally. Evernote doesn't really do this. This is the primary reason I only trust it for notes that I don't really care about. Anything really important I keep in other note apps that do let me easily export the notes. Unfortunately those other apps have other downsides that keep my coming back to Evernote.
* The note app can store notes of just about any size. I have some really really long notes that I don't want divided up among multiple notes. Evernotes doesn't appear to have a note size limit, I've found that most other note apps do have a limit that is far less than the length many of my notes already are.
* I want seamless and automatic synching across platforms. It needs to work well and not lose any of what I have typed (Evernote fails in this regard). I shouldn't have a ton of duplicate versions of my note with timestamps because the synching has gotten all out of wack (Evernote does this a lot).
* It should be easy to create a new note. This is basically Evernote's number one benefit from what I've experienced.
* It should be easy to create links between notes like a personal wiki. I have one (unfortunately no longer being developed) note taking app that excels at this. So far I haven't found how/if this is possible in Evernote. It's certainly not easily discoverable if it is possible.
* It should use Markup as the underlying formatting engine. This goes back to the first point about being able to export the notes in a non-propietary format.