Pages won't search for a word in a document

The use of the Pages Find command has nothing to do with Spotlight or selected Spotlight search results selections. In Pages, you use the Find tool in search of text strings or characters which will be noted by yellow or gray indices. I have a 180-page document opened in Pages v11.2 on macOS 11.6.2. In that document, I want to locate the text string strange secrets that happen to be on the very last page.

If I had surrounded that search string with double quotes, Pages would have found every double quote in the entire document.

The Spotlight menu extra 🔍 tool, or the search field in a Finder window use Spotlight keywords that Apple describes in their Narrow your search results on Mac.

Had I used Spotlight instead, I could have used the following syntax to find the Pages document containing the same string:

The first document retrieved is the one containing the sought string, though the OR condition does return other Pages documents for which the string is not found. Using an AND condition instead of the OR returns nothing, which is counter-intuitive.

Hello jhudgina! Thank you for participating in the Apple Support Communities.

We understand that the search function isn’t working as expected in Pages. We'd like to look into this with you to see how we can help. 

You may find this article useful for reference: Find and replace text in Pages on Mac

If the issue persists, does it work as expected when in safe mode: How to use safe mode on your Mac?

If you’re still unable to search in Pages, let’s try this feature in a new user account: Set up users, guests, and groups on Mac

Make it a great day!