Hi Richard,
Thanks for your report. However, Google Groups isn't the place to post specific technical issues, as this forum is meant more for general discussion of the platform and services.
If you believe you've identified and can reproduce an issue with the platform itself (behaviour is different from documentation or error occurs during normal use), then you should proceed to
open a public issue tracker issue with enough detail to reproduce the issue on our side, or if possible, an attached app that can be used to directly observe the behaviour.
Your issue report contains not quite enough information to determine what is happening, so I suggest adding some more information:
* a code example of what you have done
* a precise description of what you observe vs. what you expect to observe from the documentation
From looking at it on the surface, I'm inclined to believe that the devserver is in error and the production search is working as it should, although to know for sure will require investigation, and that should be tracked via the public issue tracker.
If you would like to open a thread in this forum discussing the platform or services in more broad terms, starting a discussion that would be useful for other users to join in to, feel free to do so.
Have a great day!