Search in the Notes app doesn’t work

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??

I'm a longtime / heavy Notes + iCloud user, and this is starting to drive me insane. As others have commented, in olden times I could drop a word or phrase into the search box inside notes on macOS / iOS and get every relevant result in moments.

Today however, (macOS Sonoma + iOS 17.0.3) search results in Notes are totally unreliable. For instance, I just searched for my manager's name and it returned a few random notes I took during meetings weeks ago, but not the two notes containing my log of our most recent meetings last week - I had to manually scroll through the list searching for them visually.

This is super frustrating, and is making me reconsider my move from Evernote years ago. I really really hope Apple fixes this!

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..

I’ve had tons of issues with Apple in the past 6 months, but this one takes the cake (and is possibly the last straw for me). I am a songwriter and have relied heavily on Notes for 6+ years since I’m constantly on the go.

I just updated to iOS 17, and now, I cannot search through my thousands of notes. This is impacting my ability to efficiently go back to old projects and resume working on them/send them to other artists.

Nobody needed this new AI implementation for searching thru notes. it’s a notes app for Pete’s sake, it should be simple and impossible to break. So disappointed right now.

I'm in a similar boat in that I noticed recently (as of early December 2023) that searching for a keyword in my notes was only returning a fraction of the results I was expecting on my iPhone 12 and Macbook Air (M1), both with updated software. I keep everything in iCloud (i.e., not saved locally on either device). But it works perfectly if you put quotes around the search term (e.g., "Mike"). Search also seems to work perfectly without quotes on icloud.com. Agree that this is a strange bug and should be fixed.

Not sure, but one thing I did before upgrading to 17.1 was 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.

Also, just fyi. I just searched for a word in a photo that is in a note and it found it. I searched for “Duron” and it found a note where I had taken a picture of a paint can. The word was not written anywhere else in the note. It was only in the image.

Hope that helps you.

My Notes app also does not search on my brand new mac studio. I fixed it once (last week) by clearing the caches folder in the hidden libraries directory, but the issue has returned and clearing the caches is not helping.

All of my notes exist on icloud and work perfectly on my phone, macbook and other mac machines. Here is a screenshot of me searching for the letter "A" with no results...

(but I disagree about apple stock, I hope it continues to rise :)

I had the same thing with macOS Sonoma.

The solution mentioned in this thread worked for me:

• System Settings > Siri & Spotlight
• Turn off a bunch of checkboxes, I turned them all off other than Applications, which is the only category I want Spotlight search for anyway
• Close Notes
• Open Notes

Then search-across-notes started working again.

Thank you so much i did exactely what you mentioned and it worked i appreciate.

Same problem. Notes work great on Ipad and iPhone. Able to search on these devices, but when I pull up notes app on Mac, they are all there, but when you search a topic note that include this word or topic none come up. Where as on my phone or iPad all notes with that word come up.

yep, that gif is exactly how the search function on Notes USED to work...now when u tap the equivalent of "per" in the search bar, all you do is open Notes but not the one u were searching for...u have to scroll around for that.

Apple when u fixing this?

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!

I'm on Sonoma 14.1.1 and iOS 17.1.1 and experiencing the same unreliable search results on both. I'll type in a word and it will just return some results that has the word in it, but not all.

A "workaround" I found is search results seem to work how I expect using notes via icloud.com.

But hope they fix Sonoma and iOS soon, I just finished moving everything from Evernote as I wanted something simpler and more reliable :(

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.