suggested search not functioning the same literally all of a sudden

Safari suggestions has always been off; was never a fan. Search Engine suggestions is on and is working. That is to say it's giving me the suggestions. I did try to toggle it on and off at their suggestion and no go.

It's a hard problem to describe so I'll try to be more concise.

Say I type the word "Carrot" with the goal of finding a carrot cake recipe. I type Carrot, click Carrot Cake Recipe in the Search Engine Suggestions and it loads the search. But say now I want Carrot Cake Recipe Low Calorie. On my Mac and iPhone(and the iPad as of yesterday)I could simple tap up there and add the words Low Calorie to the words Carrot Cake Recipe already in the field. Now that doesn't work. If I tap it deletes Carrot Cake Recipe and puts Carrot(the start of the search "chain" if you will)

Oddly enough if I use my Pencil to Scribble Carrot and go from there well it works as it should.

As an experiment I just factory reset my wife's iPad and set it up as a new device...sure enough it's doing the same thing albeit less often. That tells me there is some backend nonsense going on yet again.

It's completely destroyed my workflow. It's turned 10 searches into 100.

Do you have an iPad running 17.6.1? Care to try out a search and report what happens?

Sorry, didn't mean to come off rude. Just spent 2 hours with Apple for them to just blame "Google being down". I also know how these forums usually work. Someone gives you a long winded "I understand you are having problem X. Try this long list of obvious things anyone over the age of 15 has already tried."

I've tried literally everything I can think of. Turning off iCloud, back on, keyboard settings, even tried hooking up a USB keyboard. Private relay off.

Nothing works. Plus, as you'll notice, I tried it on a different iPad and it's not working as well. Almost as if there has been A) some change to how it's supposed to work or B) yet another hidden settings change they make without telling anyone.

Oddly enough though if I use pencil to scribble in a search...well it works just fine. On-screen keyboard, Siri, even a usb keyboard it doesn't work.

In safari. It worked as of less than 24 hours ago. No changes were made to the iPad settings wise or software. It's just literally 24 hours older, that's it.

You can actually see the text be changed back into what you originally typed as if it's getting confused.

The tech on the phone tried it with his iPad and it was working as it should. Then he viewed my screen and I showed him exactly what was happening and they were stumped.

A quintessential Apple problem if there ever was one. We can do amazing things with these devices that we will do once or twice a year but the stuff we do 100s of times a day? Changes at a moments notice.

Yea, it works just fine(for now anyway lol)on my iPhone and Mac as well. Just the iPad.

Google. I did try switching to Yahoo as default search engine after the tech blamed "Google being down" and same thing.

Except that it was working yesterday and I've not updated the iPad since then.

Here is a video that shows what I mean so we can be on the same page. As of yesterday the phone and iPad worked the same. Now this. It makes it literally impossible to do additive searches for research.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/IH6gJsYf5wQ

They keep deleting my comments about how I did it but I worked out a temporary fix.

I'm a 3 decade Apple user. Finding workarounds is second nature. Thanks