Search function doesn't work properly? Not sure what happened

Scrivener Scrivener for Windows
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So I use words in Greek to mark some documents that need ‘fixing’ (such as οιδα). That way, when I search documents with those words, only the documents with Greek text appear (since I don’t write in Greek in any other part). But yesterday, when I searched for ‘οιδα’, a document appeared and didn’t have any ‘οιδα’ inside. I checked on the main text, the notes, the synopsis, everywhere it could be, but there was nothing. Then I changed the search, instead of ‘all’, to ‘main text’, then that document disappeared from the ‘search list’, but then I changed the search to look in ‘notes’ and the document appeared again. But there was no ‘οιδα’ in the notes. Not sure what happened here. I cut and pasted the text of the note (it was a small note) into the note again (I was just trying things to figure out what was going on), and the document disappeared again from the search list.

I guess it ended up being fixed, but I wonder if this has happened to anyone else? I don’t know if it happens with more documents or not, I don’t have time to go through them all, but it just seemed strange to me.

Also, I am Spanish, so please forgive any spelling mistakes I may have :blush:

-Ainoa

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It could be the search index got out of sync with the actual data in the project. To increase performance we don’t search through all of the actual files in your project as that would be really slow. Instead as you work there is a separate single file that is updated with all of your edits. While that makes things faster, there is always a risk that it can get out of sync with what is really there.

That the problem went away after you changed the text in this area of the project could indicate that’s what happened.

If this happens, use the File ▸ Save and Rebuild Search Indexes menu command. If there was one error, there may be others as well. This is safe to do, as all it does is go through every file in your project and rebuild that file from what is really there. The worst that can happen is that nothing really changes in the index.

1 Like
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I had no idea. Thanks a lot! I’ll try that :heart: