Search on ipad app not returning complete results

[justacat 38]

I am searching for notes using "intitle" (which I've always done). Searching on Android and Windows gives me a complete list of results. Searching on iPad, my results list does not include 3-4 recent notes that have the search term in the title. The notes are there in the ipad app - it's not a matter of not syncing. They're just not coming up in the search results. I've tried manually syncing, quitting and restarting the app - nothing. These notes appear if I use the search term without "intitle."

This is extremely troubling, as titles (as opposed to tags etc) are my primary method of identifying and finding notes, so I use intitle all the time. If I can't trust the search results it's a problem for me. I just don't understand why the iPad app would produce different results from the same search, since the search obviously isn't being conducted locally.

Has anyone else noticed something like this? Could I be doing something wrong?

[Feitz 179]

26 minutes ago, justacat said:

Has anyone else noticed something like this? Could I be doing something wrong?

I seem to have incorrect results on MacOS, like others have reported recently. Results being omitted, search for partial strings seems to fail etc. Errors look to be random as well but haven't tested any further. 

 

[Boot17 1,462]

@justacat Are you enclosing the search terms in quotes following "intitle" -- or is it just a one word search term you are looking for?

[justacat 38]

Just now, Boot17 said:

@justacat Are you enclosing the search terms in quotes following "intitle" -- or is it just a one word search term you are looking for?

In this case it is a single word - a name, so a capitalized proper noun. It should not need quotes. But I did try enclosing it in quotes. I also tried with the first letter capitalized (which should not be necessary). Made no difference.

[Boot17 1,462]

Ah - k. If quotes were used, sometimes iPadOS/iOS devices are set to use "smart quotes" which messes up the search in general (and I thought it would mess up the intitle search as well).

FWIW, I tried a few different intitle searches between my iPhone (10.83.0)  and Desktop Mac (10.84.3) just now and got the same number of notes found on each device.

[justacat 38]

So I did some more digging. I found that the same notes that didn't appear in my intitle search using this specific search term also didn't appear when I did an intitle search using *any* term in the title of those notes. They do appear in the results when I do a full-text search for any of those terms (i.e., just put the term in the search box without any search syntax).

So just out of curiosity, I tried a different type of search, a basic date searches - "created:20240101" - on ipad, android, windows laptop, and web, for notes created on or after 1/1/2024. I got three different numbers from the four platforms: ipad-177; android-194; laptop-197; web-194

The four additional notes on the windows laptop turned out to be from from four notes created years ago in legacy, probably in 2012 or so, with creation dates before 1997. Why they are appearing in this search I have no idea. This is another baffling bug. But putting those aside, windows, android, and web essentially gave the same number of results, while the ipad app, for some reason, failed to return 20 notes from this time period. So it's not just intitle that's the problem. However, as best I can tell, the  notes that didn''t appear in the intitle search were the same ones that didn't appear in the created search - and again, all these notes do come up in any full-text search without advanced syntax.

I wanted to do the same search for other time periods, but I couldn't figure out how to get an actual note count instead of just "1000+" in my search results. So I broke it down by year and used eg "created:20230101 -created:20240101." The iPad app again failed to return many notes with creation dates last year, in the period 1/1/2023-12/31/2024 (android and web:707; windows laptop:708; ipad:679). But for the 5 years I tested before that (going back to 2019), the iPad app was accurate - the number of results exactly matched the others.

So for some reason the iPad app, when searching, is simply ignoring or not properly recognizing some notes created recently - but only when using certain search syntax. There is no problem with notes created more than a year or so ago.

I have absolutely no idea what to make of this or what to do about it. I can tolerate a lot of inconveniences or things I don't like about v.10, but not being able to rely on search results is a tough one.

[thefryhole 50]

The filtered notes widgets on iPhone no longer return any results at all, even though the same widget on desktop works fine and typing the search syntax manually returns at least some results. I don't know if it's part of the same bug you're experiencing but it makes mobile even less useful than it's become recently.

[gazumped 11,686]

If you have issues,  please contact Support - it may take a while for them to respond,  but at least they're aware that search has an issue.