There are probably a lot of reasons behind that. First, people aren't necessarily using the same relays they used a few years ago. I know I'm not. When they switch, they rarely export their notes from their old relays and import them to their new ones.
Relays also don't necessarily keep notes for that long. Popular relays may have automatic deletion of old notes, or then theres the Damus relay, which gets fully nuked from time to time.
If the note does still exist somewhere, it might be on a relay that is currently offline, or that the client is having trouble connecting to, or that doesn't support search, or that has rate-limited requests, or... You can see where this is going.
So long as notes can live on various different relays that aren't all following exactly the same policies, it's going to be unpredictable whether you can find a specific note.
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I'm saying, I can type the text of a note word for words into the chat. One day I'll find it. Another I won't. A few days later I'll find it again. Search on amethyst is very inconsistent.
Yeah, exactly. The reason being that it is inconsistent what relays can be connected to at a given time and the note doesn't exist on Amethyst, it exists on some relay or another.
The relays Amethyst can successfully connect to do factor in, though. It would be doing text search via your search relays. If the note isn't on the ones Amethyst was able to connect to, and is only on a search relay it could not connect to, then it won't find it.
There are all sorts of reasons that a client may not be able to connect to a relay besides it just being down.
I won't say that it couldn't be a client performance issue, but most of the time inconsistencies on Nostr in general are due to not being connected to the same relays for one reason or another. No one's fault. Just the nature of working with multiple relays rather than a centralized server.
