Searching for Pages & Posts when adding Menu items isn't working correctly

[leecollings]

I'm completely amazed that this hasn't been raised enough times or has more of an online presence because it's causing a huge issue for me right now.

I have over 120 pages for one site, and I want to find one of these pages and add it as a menu item.

I know the title of the page, but when I type this into the search field for adding a page to a menu, loads of other pages are displayed, but none relating to what I've typed, and not the one I've typed it (I've typed in the title EXACTLY as it is named on the page).

How on earth is the search algorithm for the menu page search working exactly? I would expect this page to be shown here... but for some reason it's not, and neither are a few other pages I type.

I have no idea why it's showing the pages that are showing up because there are no keywords that I've typed in, nor are they relevant at all.

If I go to the Pages screen and search there, it finds it fine.

I am completely unable to add pages to my menu because of this, please can someone look into this and confirm there is something wrong here (I cannot see how I'm not doing this right, or how this could be expected to perform any other way).

[leecollings]

Searching for 'Being a Clairvoyant' page when adding a new menu item

[leecollings]

Same search displaying expected page when searching Pages

[leecollings]

When searching the internet I also found this which reports the same thing (from two years ago).

​https://wordpress.org/support/topic/search-page-function-on-appearance-menu-section-not-working/

[cynops]

I have noticed the same issue multiple times on a site with 250+ pages. I'm working in version 5.8.

For example, we have a page where the page title is Contact ABCD, and the slug is contact-abcd. When searching for this page to add it to the menu, the word contact doesn't bring it up. Nor does contact ABCD.

I did find two workarounds. One is finding it in the View All list. The other is to put the query in quotes, "contact ABCD".