I’ve recently been working on an EE site with a large volume of custom fields and matrixes. While implementing the search module, I noticed that the contents of certain matrixes were not searchable/showing up in search results using the EE search module.
The fields themselves and their individual columns (either plain text or WYGWAM fields) were checked as searchable, but some of them (seemingly arbitrarily) were not searchable.
The solution I found was to convert the field types from one type to another. For example if a WYGWAM column within the matrix was not searchable, I found that converting it to plain text, and re-publishing the entry, would fix the problem and all the contents of the matrix would now become searchable. The solution worked both ways, i.e. a plain text field could be made searchable by converting to WYGWAM and re-publishing. I always converted the field types back to their original state afterward, and removed any extra p tags etc - the fields always stayed searchable after the initial conversion.
I attribute this to the possibility that by editing the field type, EE was somehow forced to “index” the field and its contents for the search module.
I’m not exactly sure why this problem only happened to certain matrixes in my site and not others, but I’d be interested to know if anyone else has experienced this problem, or knows more about how the search module goes about creating an search index.
Thanks