I was trying to find an exact phrase/sentence in Apple Notes. Quote marks did not help. Search results included Notes that contained just partial matches. Using Spotlight I got straight to the Note. Why? I asked ChatGPT to compare Spotlight to Notes Find. Sharing the response for your interest.
"Spotlight has two advantages. It uses system-level indexing, which means it ranks results with more intelligence and it applies fuzzy matching that Notes does not apply reliably. Notes search is still literal and often inconsistent with partial words, hyphenation or accented characters. Spotlight also surfaces attachments and scans faster because it has a broader index.
There is a counterargument. Spotlight can appear better simply because it offers more guessing room. When you do an exact search inside Notes, the results are sometimes more accurate because the search scope is intentionally narrow. The problem is that Notes lacks advanced filters, saved searches and proper operators. Even the tag filtering is shallow.
Expert insight
The real limitation is architectural. Spotlight sits on the Core Spotlight and metadata daemon layers of macOS and iOS, which have been tuned for ranking relevance, fuzzy search and linguistic normalisation. Notes search sits inside the Notes framework where Apple has not invested the same level of retrieval logic. Until Notes supports proper boolean operators, heuristic weighting and user-driven filters, it will always feel second tier.
The hidden pitfall: Spotlight occasionally misses freshly edited notes due to indexing lag. Notes search, slow as it is, usually reflects the current state instantly.
Prediction
Apple will eventually merge Notes search into the same semantic indexing layer that powers Spotlight and Photos search. Once that happens, on-device AI will give Notes full fuzzy matching, smart filters and context-aware ranking. Until then, Spotlight will continue to outperform it in everyday use"