Search returns too few results¶

Symptoms¶

A search finds fewer files than you know exist — or nothing at all — for a term that should clearly match.

Indexing has not finished. Files that have not yet reached the text-extraction stage match only by name and metadata. On a large collection, full-text coverage arrives gradually.
The words are inside a file type text is not extracted from. Not every format supports text extraction — a scanned image of a document, for example, is a picture unless OCR has run on it.
The text sits beyond the extraction limit. Very large documents are indexed up to a limit, so a phrase deep inside an enormous file may not be indexed.
The repository was never scanned — the folder you are thinking of may not be part of any repository yet.
You searched for meaning rather than words. Regular search matches words; "photos of the lake" as a concept is a job for visual search.

Check scan status — is indexing still in progress for the relevant repository?
Confirm the folder is catalogued — is it inside one of your repositories?
Try the filename, or a distinctive word you are sure appears early in the document.
For photos, try visual search with a description instead.

Do not delete and re-create repositories to "refresh" search — a rescan achieves the same without losing history.
Do not delete the catalogue database.

The query, what you expected it to match, and one concrete example file it missed (path can be redacted to its file type and location style).
Whether indexing had finished for that repository.
The file type of the missed file.