See  issue 578323  which explains that the Material Design "page uses an iron-list [...] without actually rendering them all on the page. This means that searching using the page's search field works differently than searching using Chrome's native Ctrl+F search".

Evidently, the same functionality is used for MD history. And indeed, current implementation breaks the use case of searching for "some site I visited before/after this one I remember".

Idea: add a button/whatever to each search result that will focus this item in the history shown in normal full mode.

This behavior is Working As Intended, following the reasoning in  issue 578323 . The data being searched is not actually on the page until it's needed, which means the normal cmd-f search box would not be able to search any history except the history already present on the page. The UX is a little surprising but absent a new web API for exposing find-in-page to the page it more or less has to work this way.

Just so we're clear, I don't want to use cmd-f to search my history, I want to use it to search the text that is rendered in the current document. When I go to the history page, it renders links for all the urls I have visited the last several days. I want to do a normal text search through the already-rendered links.

Sorry if I am asking the same question twice, but youre saying ^that is impossible?

 Issue 760836  has been merged into this issue.