Search does not read your project. It reads a separate index, and your work is copied into that index only if it is published, is not private, and has not been deleted. If any one of those is false there is no entry to find, and all of them look identical from the results page: your work is simply not there. So work through the checklist below in order rather than guessing, because the causes are listed by how often they turn out to be the answer.
Run this checklist
- Confirm it is published, not saved. This is the most common answer by a wide margin. A project you have saved but never published has no entry in the index at all, and neither does one whose only published version is older than the changes you are searching for. Open it from your profile and check. Creating and publishing a project covers the step.
- Confirm it is not private. A private project is removed from search entirely, not merely hidden from strangers. It stays visible to you everywhere else, which is what makes this one hard to spot.
- Wait an hour after publishing. Indexing runs in the background after you publish rather than during the save, so there is always a gap. It is usually under two minutes, occasionally half an hour when the queue is busy.
- Search the Projects tab, not All. The All tab answers a repeated search from a cache that holds each search for 6 hours, so a search you ran before publishing can keep returning its old answer for the rest of the day. The Projects, Journals and Publications tabs are not cached and always run live.
- Search a phrase from the published page. Search matches the text listed below, not everything on the page. An exact phrase from your published description is the sharpest test.
- Search something specific rather than one common word. For very broad single words the keyword ranking step is skipped and results are ordered by meaning alone, so your project can be present but far down. Two or three words fixes it.
Private removes your work from search, it does not filter it
Switching a project to private deletes its entry from the index and pulls its images out of the Media tab at the same time. Deleting the project does the same thing. This is worth understanding because it is not reversible on the spot: switching back to public rebuilds the entry and restores the images, on the same background job and the same timing as a first publish. Going private for a while costs you nothing permanent, but nothing of yours is searchable while it lasts. See making a published project private.
What is actually searched
For a project, the index holds the title and description of the published version, its disciplines, the names of everyone on the team, its location, and text read out of its images. It does not hold anything from a draft you are still editing.
Journals and publications use the same index
They sit in the same index as projects and follow the same rule, keyed on status: a journal or publication is indexed only while it is published. Move one back to draft and its entry is deleted, and publishing it again rebuilds it. For a publication that is a PDF, the words inside the PDF are indexed as well, but that pass runs after the page images are built, so allow longer for a phrase from page 40 than for the title.
When to conclude something is wrong
If your project is published, is not private, and an exact phrase from its published description still returns nothing on the Projects tab an hour later, stop retrying. That is a real fault rather than a delay, and contacting support with the project link is the fastest way through it.