Partial word match often broken after upgrading to Sequoia...

OK, here's an example. I actually wanted to give one earlier but blanked on any of the examples that I had experienced.

If I search on "jeff", you will see that I have four vids that also contain the word "Vermont" in the name of the file:

But if I search on "vermont", the search only returns two of them:

This is why I think something is broken. I cannot see why this would happen else-wise. For most such searches, it finds all relevant returns and does not skip any, with all having essentially the same name scheme. It's just that some searches fail to return all the items that it should return. But if I search on the full name of a file which was omitted in a previous result, it finds it, so it is clearly available in the index.

Oh, and I looked at Comments and such, and all of these files have no metadata that has "Vermont" in it. For all of these files, the only "jeff" or "vermont" is in the file name. There's not even any text in the vids that would be detectable, if somehow Macs could do that.

Thanks.

Thanks, but why then does it usually work but just sometimes fail? I have always named files with a string of words with no spaces and search always has found them, even if I just search on one of the words anywhere in the name. Now, in Sequoia, it will usually work, but not always.

I used to run a huge ECM system and if this was happening there, I would have been immediately on the phone with the vendor explaining that there's something wrong with the search function of their app because the object is clearly in the index but isn't being found by search. I have no idea about how Mac does things though so I can't even begin to guess if there are multiple indexes and if one of them is damaged, or if there is some kind of search federator problem, etc. Moreover, the fact that search can sometimes take 5-10 seconds to run on an M2 MBP which is severely underutilized is another indicator of search problems. All I know is that since upgrading to Sequoia, I've had all kinds of search problems. I'm thinking of trying another reindex.

ECM = Enterprise Content Management

There are several such as Microsoft SharePoint, or in my case, Opentext Content Server (AKA, Livelink). Actually, I worked with both, but mostly Opentext. With some ECMs, such as Sharepoint, search is functional but not particularly robust and configurable. With Opentext, the search/indexing is quite robust and configurable. Up until recently, I ran several of these systems for over 20 years in a pretty large environment, with god only knows how many million docs of just about every possible file type. I was pretty knowledgable about the indexing and search functions, so it is now frustrating for me to be trying to figure out the Mac search, which is doubtlessly much simpler but, as far as I can tell, not exactly well documented.

Thank you for your detailed reply and testing, but I still am confused. I get how to do complex search queries but you seem to be indicating that the search isn't broken and I don't understand how that can be true given that, as far as I can tell, there is no rhyme or reason to what I see. Most of the time, if I just type a word/string into the search box in the top right of a finder window, it will find that word/string pretty much anywhere, ranging from the Comments of a file, to its name, to metadata, and everything in between. Doubtlessly they are all indexed as separate regions, which is why the detailed search can break them down in the more focused search. It almost always works fine on a partial string match. It might not find "tree" in ChristmasTreeNew.jpg, at the same time it will find "Mac" in RetiredMacStack.jpg (all case insensitive). It almost always will find the docs I'm looking for, it just sometimes doesn't. I could understand if the item was missing from the index, but because it will find it if I search on the fuller name, starting from the beginning, it is clearly in the index. For lack of proper terminology, the name field seems to be intact in the index, so if it were my old ECM system, I would be pretty certain that the problem is with the search function, basically some bug where it doesn't always fully read the name field.