What exactly should the search in gnome-shell do?

[Colin Law]

On 1 May 2017 at 00:04, SDA <marathon.durandal at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 30, 2017 at 09:15:47AM +0100, Colin Law wrote:
>> I am trying out the gnome desktop in Ubuntu and am confused about
>> exactly what the search feature in Activities is supposed to do with
>> regard to files searching. The feature is accessed by bringing up
>> Activities and typing in the search field.
>>
>> It appears to find files both by name and content, but does not seem
>> consistent in exactly what is found. I have not managed to find a
>> complete description of what it is supposed to do. Does anyone here
>> know?
>>
>> Colin
>
> Gnome-Shell comes with a handy "help" menu. Suggest you become familiar with
> it.

Thanks for that suggestion, I have tried there and have now tried again.

In Help I found the page headed 'Use the system search', however all
that says about file searching is that it finds 'matching documents'
but no definition of what that means. However it then says that I
should be able to click on, for example, Files in the search to get
additional results. Unfortunately, in the case I am trying to
understand, I have entered a file name that I know exists in a
directory under my Home directory and it appears that Files has
provided no results so I do not get a chance to click on the Files
icon. If I open Files manually and search for that file there then it
does find it.

Other filenames that I enter in the system search *are* found in the
Files section, so is there a bug somewhere?

Is it possible that the files search from the system search only
searches particular folders?  I ask this as it seems that it finds
files in Documents but possibly not in other folders under my Home.

I have checked in System Settings > Search and both Files and
Documents are enabled.

Colin