Preview 5.0(501) can't search effectively anymore

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I just upgraded to Snow Leopard yesterday, I was pretty happy initially as it is really faster, but I am starting to regret now, as I discovered more and more flaws in it. Here is one of the major flaws that bug me.

In 10.5.8, you can use Preview to search the whole PDF, you type in what you want to search in the Find Box, you will get what you need. In Snow Leopard, you type in the word and it will give you a search rank with hundreds or even thousands of search results, the majority of them are useless results, or even results that doesn't exist, such as blank pages!!!! This slow down the process of finding what you really need.

I am not sure if I am missing out something or Apple simply removed the search function like the way it was before? May someone tell me how to search PDF effectively?
 

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?? - appears to be working flawlessly here - the largest pdf I've worked with in SL is approx 170 pages - have done well over 50 searches in that one - no issues - even with words that return hundreds of hits the results are almost instantaneous

better description or perhaps even a couple of screenshots
 
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?? - appears to be working flawlessly here - the largest pdf I've worked with in SL is approx 170 pages - have done well over 50 searches in that one - no issues - even with words that return hundreds of hits the results are almost instantaneous

better description or perhaps even a couple of screenshots

Thanks for helping.

In the old Preview, all I need to do is to type the word I want to search and all the relevant result appears instantly.

Now, even with that -com command, it can't produce my desired search.

For example I want to search なければ in my 300 pages Japanese PDF, it produces 0 finding. With the -com command it also produces 0 findings. Is it really 0? **** no, that word is even right in front of me and the search engine couldn't find it. Not to mention there are so many more in that file.

With the old Preview, it brought out what I needed instantly.
 

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Try it in an english language pdf - see if it can be narrowed down to something to do with the language packs instead of a Preview problem.

Or possibly an issue in the way Preview is handling different languages.
 
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Try it in an english language pdf - see if it can be narrowed down to something to do with the language packs instead of a Preview problem.

Or possibly an issue in the way Preview is handling different languages.

Thanks again, but this issue never existed before I upgraded to Snow Leopard, it is clearly a Preview problem, I guess??

Even on English language PDF, when you search it produces a lot of unnecessary searches, therefore making finding what you really need difficult.
 

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Still don't know what you mean by unnecessary searches. It either finds all instances of what you have put into the search field, finds nothing, or returns items that do not match the search field.

When returning "all" matches of the search field, it necessarily will return matches that are not the ones you're looking for.

When you use Command + G (or whatever the equivalent Japanese shortcut is for 'Find Next') it takes you through matches of your search, it shows things which it claims are matches but are not, or it returns items which match but are irrelevant to what you want?

A screenshot is worth a thousand words.
 
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Still don't know what you mean by unnecessary searches. It either finds all instances of what you have put into the search field, finds nothing, or returns items that do not match the search field.

When returning "all" matches of the search field, it necessarily will return matches that are not the ones you're looking for.

When you use Command + G (or whatever the equivalent Japanese shortcut is for 'Find Next') it takes you through matches of your search, it shows things which it claims are matches but are not, or it returns items which match but are irrelevant to what you want?

A screenshot is worth a thousand words.


Here is that Japanese PDF I was talking about. (http://www.nihongoresources.com/media/An introduction to Japanese.pdf)

Type なければ in the search box, it will return 0 findings. But there are many なければ in this PDF.

Regarding those unnecessary searches, what I mean is that the new Preview 5.0 can find result in a blank page. A blank page, totally nothing, will appear in one of the results by the search engine. You can try using this same PDF and type させる and you will find pages in the search result that do not contain this term.
 

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Looks to me as though Preview 5.0 is not compatible with Japanese at this time.

Found your thread at apple discussions also - Mine is a clean install of OS X - the Japanese side here does not work properly either.

The first group of 4 letters - the last letter of the group is not recognized at all. If I delete that one, then I get a proper return. If I delete another letter from that group, then I get the same returns you're experiencing. Some pages that do have a match but it is not highlighted and some pages that do not have a match nor even return the page I know has a match.

Searching in english produces accurate results for about 30 varied searches I tried.
 
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Looks to me as though Preview 5.0 is not compatible with Japanese at this time.

Found your thread at apple discussions also - Mine is a clean install of OS X - the Japanese side here does not work properly either.

The first group of 4 letters - the last letter of the group is not recognized at all. If I delete that one, then I get a proper return. If I delete another letter from that group, then I get the same returns you're experiencing. Some pages that do have a match but it is not highlighted and some pages that do not have a match nor even return the page I know has a match.

Searching in english produces accurate results for about 30 varied searches I tried.

Thanks for spending time to try, appreciate your time and effort. I hope Apple is aware of this problem.

Thanks again. :)
 
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Preview under 10.6.1 (Version 5.0 (501))

The search function doesn't work particularly well in English either. Definitely less well than previous versions.

While the idea of a search rank seems good, it is noticeably slower and doesn't find spelling errors (which may be a good thing). I'm not sure what it uses to rank the hits. I can't make any sense of the ordering.
 

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