I have a very large project file where many of my research documents were screenshots of 19th century newspaper articles. I would flag these in the Synopsis as “NOT TRANSCRIBED” so I could find them later and transcribe or OCR them. As I replace the images with text, I delete this flag from the synopsis. However, when I search for “NOT TRANSCRIBED”, I get everything that ever had that in the synopsis, making my search results meaningless. I’m dealing with about 15,000 documents here, so this is a not-insignificant problem. Why am I getting hits on text which no longer exists?
Have you looked at one of the “ghost” results to see what Scrivener is highlighting?
The most likely causes are files that are in the Trash, or files that contain that phrase in some other metadata, such as the Status.
Also, make sure you’re searching for “Exact Phrase.” Searching for “Any Word” will give you hits for “not,” which is probably not what you want.
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I’m actually only searching the word “TRANSCRIBED” specifically to avoid false hits. I’ve looked now at dozens of these ghost results, and there is nothing highlighted. I search the document and the word is not found. Anyway, it’s simply not plausible that the word “transcribed” appears in thousands of 19th century newspaper articles I’ve gathered. I clear my trash, so that isn’t the issue. It seems to be finding a word which once was, but is no longer, in the Synopsis. Somehow the metadata is persisting, even once I delete it.
I hope you find a solution for this, you could try searching for no as would flag [not] which is what you want. The other way in retrospect would be using a keyword, or label for transcribed or not transcribed and this could then be turned into a dynamic search collection.
Try rebuilding the search index. On the Mac, you do that by holding the Alt key, which will let you access the File → Save and Rebuild Search Indexes command.
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Ah! Ok, thanks. I’m on a PC but I see that option. Will let you know how it goes! This seems promising.