I’m having a really frustrating issue with Apple Notes search and I’m starting to lose my mind (on mac). This problem started after i updated to MacOS Tahoe
The search is slow, and it often doesn’t show what I’m looking for even when I type the exact title of the note. The note won’t appear under “Top Results”, but if I scroll further down the results list, I can eventually find it.
I’ve already tried the following, but nothing helped:
I signed out of iCloud on my Apples notes on Mac, restarted, and signed back in so all notes had to re-download.
I disabled Spotlight indexing and enabled it again to force a re-index.
But the problem is still there.
Has anyone experienced the same issue and found a fix? Is there anything else I can try to make Notes search work properly again?
I wish I could help, but this is my experience on iPadOS as well. It’s why I can’t go all in on Apple Notes or trust it in a moment of need. Search is just too unreliable.
I have slightly over 1,100 notes in AN. Search on the Mac running Tahoe has been reliable for me. I’m able to find most anything I need. For example, I ran a search for “Southwest.” The search not only revealed notes with the word, but also included PDFs where the word was found. I ran several other searches before replying to your post to see if I had trouble finding what I was searching for. I did not. AN’s search is not nearly as powerful as something like DEVONthink, but I’ve had no problem finding what I’m looking for.
Unless you’ve just posted on Reddit, under a different name, you’re not the only one having problems. Both these posts are by the same person. One is a year old, the other just 5 hours.
It appears large complex documents can also be a problem.
I’m not certain if this is your practice, and even if it is, it might not be relevant. However, I don’t store many large files in Apple Notes. I have some PDFs, but the notes are primarily text. I store all my research files in DEVONthink. I don’t believe Apple Notes is designed to serve as an archival system for numerous notes containing PDFs. It is primarily for taking notes; I’m not sure Apple envisions Apple Notes serving a “database” function. I may be entirely mistaken about this, but that’s my intuitive thinking.
