It turns out that the search provider works for the local address book but not online accounts. I have tested Google and ownCloud accounts. The contacts load successfully in gnome-contacts but they do not appear in shell search.

Thanks for the report Michael. I'm unable to reproduce here, but I'll believe you. :)

Just to check - you can successfully search in the contacts app with an online account?

Hi, Allan. Thanks for the response. I have been busy with exams so I apologise for the delay. I'll attach a screencast of the behaviour. I will be doing a fresh install on a new laptop drive and report back if it occurs again.

I'll be relieved if I am the only one experiencing this. I have a suspicion this may have been caused by an upgrade from 3.10. (Running Arch)

Created attachment 277778 [details]
Screencast of contacts search results not appearing in shell.

Okay, I have a fresh, clean installation of GNOME 3.12.2 on a fresh, clean installation of Arch Linux. The search provider still doesn't work as expected. It's just plain misbehaving. I can view and search contacts using the gnome-contacts application just fine but when using the shell, multiple unexpected things can happen:

 - No results.
 - An empty search provider block with just the contacts icon.
 - Partial and/or incorrect results. i.e. 'Chris' will list Chad and Christine but not Chris.
 - The correct search results.

These things can happen for every letter entered and for every letter deleted. I will attach a screencast of me typing the same search term over and over, displaying the wonky behaviour.

This is a minor inconvenience for me as I have been getting used to not using the shell for searching contacts. But if this is an indication of a flaw in the code somewhere, I would love to be able to help pinpoint it.

Please see http://youtu.be/pKJpENfNJEE

Hi,
I would like for you to try something.
Can you open a terminal and type in there: "journalctl --user -f | grep -i contact" after that try to search in the overview and attach the output of the terminal command

Hi, Erick. I get a number of dbus related error messages. 

If I follow the journal messages for 'dbus' instead, for each 

"org.gnome.Contacts.SearchProvider[565]: g_dbus_connection_real_closed: Remote peer vanished with error: Underlying GIOStream returned 0 bytes on an async read (g-io-error-quark, 0). Exiting."

message it is immediately followed by at least one of the following messages:

"org.gnome.Photos[565]: ** (gnome-photos:5110): WARNING **: Unable to fetch the list of available renderers: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name com.intel.dleyna-renderer was not provided by any .service files"

Both attatched.

Created attachment 278148 [details]
Output of "journalctl --user -f | grep -i contact"

Created attachment 278149 [details]
Output of "journalctl --user -f | grep -i dbus"

(In reply to comment #9)
> Created an attachment (id=278148) [details]
> Output of "journalctl --user -f | grep -i contact"

Thxs, can I give you a patch for contacts to try, or should I package it for you to test it ?

I'm glad to help out where ever I can. I am willing to try the patch.

Created attachment 278779 [details]
Archlinux package and its sources

@Michael, here is the Archlinux package with the patch. There's another bunch of changes but you don't need to worry about it.

@Erik, thank you. I have tried it but now it's actually not working at all.

The same journalctl output from previous attachments and now Contacts is missing from the Search settings in control-center.

That's indeed not the best package.
I'll update the package. Can you first uninstall contacts with "pacman -Rdn gnome-contacts" and then install the package I provided you.
After that relogin into your session and please attach the journalctl output.
I'm added some login I would like to check on that output.
Thxs

Created attachment 279047 [details]
New updated Archlinux package

It's not actually a duplicate, but the fix will fix both bugs

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 685227 ***