I have two hard-drive bays in my computer. My OS is in one and my files, etc. are on the other. My home folder has symlinks, and it appears Nepomuk does not follow them. All is well, the documentation says, since I can individually select which folders to index. After 3 or 4 clicks I see that Nepomuk and virtuoso-t are working, presumably to index my big drive.

Now, before I included the folder where it is mounted manually in Settings > Desktop Search, whenever I searched in Dolphin (Find + word) I would see a notification at the bottom right that said "Searching" and some time later the search results would appear. After indexing with desktop search, the results come up empty all the time, regardless of what I type, whenever I search in any folder in my big drive (i.e. 0 files, 0 folders found for anything I search for).

If I uncheck that folder and run the Nepomuk cleaner, Dolphin goes back to its old behavior. However, I would appreciate having fast search available. And I think this might have something to do with Nepomuk since whenever I search for something in Krunner, I don't really see any of the search results I would expect to see (whether my drive is indexed or not...though when it is indexed Krunner every now and then will find a folder that is related to what I wanted, but little more).

How can I debug this? I am using Ubuntu 13.10 and have installed kubuntu-full from the kubuntu backports. KDE version is 4.12.2. Many thanks!

During the indexing process, could you monitor ~/.xsession-errors to see if it is having issues reading the contents of certain files? While i'm not entirely sure on how Nepomuk builds it's index, it is possible that it may be failing to read metadata from some files - leading to them being missing from the index.

I must apologize for this one. ~/.xsession-errors didn't change before or after indexing. Further, I have been running a series of experiments over the past two days and have realized that my claim that Nepomuk was not indexing my second hard drive is untrue. Rather, I had a lack of understanding of how KDE search works. What I have discovered is

1. It is not just that Nepomuk does not index symlinks, but whenever you come to a folder via a symlink the search in Dolphin will come up empty. This is fair enough and totally on me. I still find it odd but it is there in the documentation.

2. Krunner and Lancelot do not search by partial names. That is, if a file is named "ReallyLongFileName*ReallyLongSubtitle" where * is a space, a dash, underscore, etc. you need to search for "ReallyLongFileName" or "ReallyLongSubtitle" but searching "FileName" or "ReallyLong" comes up empty. A Google search reveals appending a * to your search fixes the issue.

3. Krunner and Lancelot search by file name but display file title (and if you search the file title they will not find it). These two are not the same, and thus whenever I searched for a file name but got back a title that was unrelated to my file (sometimes symbols or seemingly random letters were the title), I concluded they found nothing.

This last one I do find very confusing. While having to remember to start all my searches with **<Left> is only slightly inconvenient, I feel that having a system that searches for file names but returns file titles is confusing. Is there a setting to make Krunner and Lancelot display file names (i.e. what I search for) instead of file titles?

As far as I'm aware, no such setting exists i'm afraid - I do agree that it is rather confusing though, so this may be worth a bug report.

Ok. I guess the ideal implementation would be to be able to search and display both or either one, but at the moment displaying the file name would be helpful. Under what application do I file this? kded-appmenu or nepomuk? My guess would be kded-appmenu, is that right?

PS: Is there a way to make it so Krunner / Lancelot search by partial file name? I just realized there are some nuances to using the wildcard.

Please file it against KRunner. The requirement to use wildcards is also a bug - this should be automatic.

I have filed the bugs. Many thanks for the help!