Search in the Notes app doesn’t work

Find in Note (in Notes) not working in 17.0.1

Again.

try command+F for keyword search

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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Same issue with apple notes not working on my newest Ipad. It is at least 2 years and problem not solved. Have done all of your suggested fixes, the newer ipad won’t search notes.

old ipad will, they both operate ios 16.2

very frustrating. Wery crappy this bug still exists too Notes

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.

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!

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?

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’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 am running Sonoma 14.1.2 on an Airbook M1. I was having the same Notes unsearchable problem.

Then I remembered it had started occurring (I believed) when I put in a limitation of Spotlight searching certain Folders on my Mac, in Settings > Siri & Spotlight > Spotlight Privacy.

I removed the folders that I had put there, and after restarting Notes, voila! search in Notes started working again!

Weirdly, I went back in to Spotlight Privacy, and put the same folders I had before, went back to Notes, restarted it, and ... Search was STILL working.

Hope that helps!

Go figure that one out Apple.

I don't get it. The iCloud.com version of Notes can't even "Find" within a given note. Web app only searches the list of notes on the left side, but not within the note. Also Notes for the past decade, only searches across notes and finds the first instance of a string. Both of these make using this app for notes pointless, but I can do the find from my macOS machine Notes app instead the Win machine where I'm using iCloud webapp.

Mac OS Memo in 2024 still no fix 🤣 It's just like iOS clipboard permission bug. They've been letting it as fukked as it is for years. I really wonder where Apple is going these days. My guess is that fixing bugs don't get theme any good on their performance review.

I too am a heavy NOTES user until the last 6 months.

My return key no longer returned to the next line & the up & down arrows not longer allowed me to navigate line by line w/ the note…they took be to other NOTES!

You may have just saved me throwing my ipad OUT the window.

THANK YOU!

Yeah same issues here I already switched off of the piece of **** known as apple because I’m tired of them gaslighting us into thinking they’re soooo superior. When Samsungs have essentially every feature apple has and more. Plus you’re able to change the UI into pretty much the same setup as an iPhone so it’s not even that big of a learning curve to use.

It’s a shame apple doesn’t actually give a **** at all about user experience just adding like 2 new features for each new phone and expect that to satisfy the masses then market the **** out of it gaslighting us into thinking it’s all that when it’s more like all shat.