Bugger! I just spent the last hour writing up a bug report for this since I couldn’t see one already and then I found this ticket! Glad to hear it’s already being resolved. I’ll include what I’d written here in a vague hope that some detail in it might be useful and that I haven’t entirely wasted the last hour 
Search only includes objects that have been previously viewed on the device
Expected behaviour
When I search for a search term using the search bar all objects in my space will be searched and any that match the search term will be listed in the results below the text input field.
Actual behaviour
The search only includes objects that I have previously opened on the device I’m searching from. For example I have a page titled Hereditas that I created on my phone and have not yet viewed on my computer. When I search for it I on the computer I get no results:
It is defiantly synced to my computer as it is viewable in the graph view and if I use the search button in the top right hand corner it does appear in that list. Including if I search for terms that appear in the body of that page but not the title.
However it will will not show up in the search bar no matter how long a wait for in to potentially finish indexing or syncing or something like that, until I actually open it on my computer. And then as soon as I’ve opened it then it shows up in the search bar results
This seems to be the case on both the MacOS client and the iOS client.
Reasons for expecting the expected behaviour
When making a search I think the natural assumption is that the search is global unless otherwise specified. Meaning that the search will examine all items in whatever you’re searching, unless there is some indicator to suggest it’s only searching a subset of those items. If AnyType’s search is not intended to be global then there are a number of places in the UI and documentation that I would expect some such indicator of this fact. However there does not seem to be any such indicators:
- The search button in the bottom toolbar is a standard magnify glass search icon and when you hover over it you see just the text
Search ⌘ + S.
- The description for the search shortcut in keyboard shortcut page in the docs is
Open the search pane.
- The
Feature List by Platform doco page lists Global search. The inclusion of the word “global” seems to confirm that the search is of all objects and I assume this feature must be referring to the search bar (rather than the search button on the graph) since it’s the most prominently available method of searching objects in AnyType and also because this feature is marked available both on the desktop and mobile clients and since the iOS client does not include the graph (and thus the search button on the graph) the only option for searching objects on this platform is via the search bar.
- The placeholder text for the empty input field in the search bar is
Search for an object....
In none of those places is any indication that the search isn’t looking though all objects in my space, hence why I’d assumed it would be.
There are two small things that could be potential indicators however. When the search bar is first opened and the input field is empty the results list shows a list of Recent objects of some description (I’m not sure what “recent” means here, if I open a page, edit an existing one, or create a new one, those objects don’t seem to change what shows up in the list for me. This might be a known bug.).
If you then start typing in a search term this list is replaced with your search results. However what is not replaced is the small light grey Recent objects heading for the list of objects. This remains in place above the search results so possibly that’s ment to be an indicator that the search bar doesn’t preform a global search? If that is the intention though I don’t think it’s communicating that very well.
The second thing that possibly indicates (in a very subtle way) that the non-global search behaviour of the search bar is a known behaviour of AnyType is the Use the Search section of the Locating your Objects documentation page. You would expect that this section would provide instructions on opening and using the search bar since it’s as mentioned earlier it’s by far and away the most predominate and accessible search feature in AnyType with the search button in the tool bar being shown in pretty much every view and the only search related global keyboard shortcut opening the search bar. However that page does not mention the search bar but instead provides instructions for finding and using the search button on the graph page. Maybe this is an indication that the search bar is known not to preform a global search. Or maybe it’s just out of date and the search button on the graph page was created before the search bar or something like that.
Desired fix
Ideally what I think should happen is the behaviour of the search bar should be changed to search all objects in the space, not just ones that have been opened. Hopefully this wouldn’t involve major development work since the search function in the graph page already seems to behave this way.
If there is some reason why this is not possible or desirable then it would be good to at least modify the copy and documentation in the above mentioned places to indicate the current behaviour of only searching previously viewed objects.
Additional info
Technical information
Device: computer-hostname.lan
OS version: darwin arm64 13.4.1
App version: 0.34.3
Build number: build on 2023-08-16 11:07:20 +0000 UTC from at #2815587c8afa3f81e75336226cacecb7fe105e9c(v0.27.21)
Library version: v0.27.21
Account ID: A7jEYifY7VxjfYu18ucLydmd3rRQnwcdEyHGVvc8Y7D2TnWC
Analytics ID: 1491a2c4-5805-4f43-9064-b12896b694de
Device ID: 12D3KooWSbfmJvAKvY8oaUc3WJ7n2x5TGQFnyk6gafUb7Crewa7m
I couldn’t find any topics reporting this particular issue but here are some related ones:
), it seems to be solved in v0.34.4-alpha, but waiting for a stable release with search working properly…
. Thanks middleware team.