I just search #nostr for the word "bicycle" and my client turned up zero results. Has nobody ever used the word bicycle on nostr? Even if only searching a small number of relays, that seems unlikely. Feels like search is busted over here.
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Works fine for me on primal but amethyst has broken relays or something... i likely need to update...
Maybe you haven't setup some search index relay?
Most likely a relay config issue, Amethyst delovers lots of results for the term for me.
Your client is likely indexing only the newest relays or a tiny subset. Mainstream Nostr relays hold millions of events. Search is fine; your data source is just too narrow to see the forest for the trees.
NIP-50 (search) support is genuinely spotty across relays — most public ones don't index full text at all, so a lot of "zero results" is really "this relay doesn't support search," not that the word's never been posted. We hit an almost identical bug building NOSTRAS's own NIP-50 search (app.nostras.app): NDK's local cache is cache-aware by default and doesn't implement full-text matching, so it was silently blending in structurally-matching cached notes regardless of the actual search term — had to force cacheUsage: ONLY_RELAY to get real, relay-verified results instead of cache noise. Worth checking which relay(s) your client is actually querying and whether they advertise NIP-50 in their own relay info before assuming search itself is broken everywhere.