Search in the Notes app doesn’t work

I remember all you needed to do is type one word, and you could get every note that had that word in it. You can no longer do that. You could even get any PDFs or PNG‘s that refer to that word. It doesn’t work like that anymore. It has downgraded horrifically..

Going to Settings, Siri & Search, Notes and turning off Suggestions Notifications helped me for the iOS version 16.1.1

i noticed notes completely lost it's search function after the ios 17 upgrade.. doesn't even work on desktop macos sonoma.. even after refreshing the icloud connectivity with notes.. this is not good, heavy user of notes! Is this a bug??

Find in Note (in Notes) not working in 17.0.1

Again.

I’m very very active note user, my note contain over thousands of words. it does have this issues before. But My major issue was: it did not show key words like it used to be. I trying everything including customer service (lead me to no where), but eventually I find out myself: each of note can not be too long, (let’s say may be one thousand words), if you put too many word in one note, you’ll have problem to search the key words, simply it didn’t show any result, make you a lot of aggravations, but if you separate this long note into two note, the problem will be resolved right away. Customer service should told me but never any, even I spoke with them for multiple times.

I was having the exact same problem - and freaking out about it! I tried the "quotes" hack and it worked perfectly. I put my search word in quotes and got all of the notes that contain that word. Whew! Thank you so much!

Just found a fix for this. If you put an inverted comma before the search term it pulls up the full list. ". I guess it is assuming that you are looking for a fixed term with just one inverted comma - so two don't seem to be neccessary - although two also work.

I found a fix!

Like many of you, I could not search in notes app. I have version 17.2.1

I tried closing notes app and reopening it with no success

I tried turning my iphone off and back on with no success

Finally I tried turning Airplane mode on and then back off and all the search functionality came back!

I hope it works for all of you! Let me know.

I don’t know if this is a permanent fix, but as of right now it fixed my problem:

Settings > Notes > siri & search >

I toggled everything off and then back on. Killed the app, reopened it, and as of now search works great again. Partial phrases bring up all the stuff again, and full phrases are finding everything.

I was mostly having problems with full phrases actually, but even partial phrases give more results now.

NOTES APP - SEARCH NOT WORKING - SOLVED!

(in my case)

These are the steps I followed (though they may not ALL be necessary)

1. Scroll to Notes app from “Settings”
2. Then on that page under “ALLOW NOTES TO ACCESS” tap on “Siri & search”
3. Under “WHILE SEARCHING” turn on the switch “Show App in Search”
4. The “Show Content in Search” switch option then appears - turn this on
5. Go back a step and tap “Accounts”
6. Under ACCOUNTS choose “iCloud”
7. This takes you to “Apple ID”
8. Choose “iCloud”
9. Under “APPS USING ICLOUD” choose “Show All”
10. Choose “Notes”
11. On my iPhone “Sync this iPhone” was turned on but ”Manage Storage” had a spinning wheel
12. Turn off the switch but STOP THERE and DON’T  tap “Delete from My iPhone” - tap “Cancel” instead
13. Tap “Manage Storage”
14. DO NOT “Delete from iCloud” but go back a step
15. On my iPhone the amount of storage then appeared
16. I stopped there and checked my Notes app and low & behold search was working again

I had this same recurring issue re notes being unable to search accurately. I tried all of the above solutions with no success. The issue turned out to be insufficient storage space on my iPhone to cache/search accurately. After I provided my device with sufficient available (unused) storage space, the search functionality (not only for notes but also for mail, app search, etc) was restored to full functionality after a restart.

BEST ANSWER is from ARPU99 on Nov 1,2023:

"I went to Settings/Messages/Siri & Search. I then turned off all 7 buttons. I turned off my iPhone for a few minutes. Turned it back on, went back and turned on all of those 7 buttons. It may have been the fix."

I also toggled off the buttons under Settings/Notes/Siri & Search. And toggled them back on when I turned my phone back on.

Now search in Notes works like a charm again. Thank you ARPU99!

It’s now working for me after iOS 17.1 update. I let it index while plugged in and on Wifi overnight. Less than 12 hours and I can now search all Notes and also Messages search works again too.

Kee_Reel wrote:

Bad bye Apple. I wish you eventually lose your share of market with your unreliable and overpriced products.

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