DEVONthink builds a Concordance of the text strings contained in a database. The default is to include alphanumeric strings ranging from 3 to 50 characters in length. Characters such as punctuation marks, parentheses, brackets, etc. are not included in the Concordance. For the sake of convenience, we’ll call all of the strings indexed in the Concordance “words”.
My main database contains 472,370 unique words in the Concordance. As most of the content of my database is in English, the most common word is “the” – it occurs 1,574,775 times, and appears in documents in 358 groups within the database. The word “The” is the 5th most common word in my database, appearing 217.452 times in documents contained within 338 groups. Although I didn’t check, I’m sure that the word “THE” is listed also.
So DEVONthink “knows” every word used in the database, which documents contain them, and the groups in which those documents are contained. DEVONthink can also analyze contextual relationships among words, in each document and across the entire database, which is the basis for artificial intelligence features such as Classify and See Also, as well as for rankings assigned to search results.
The Concordance indexing is used by Search. As might be expected, an Exact search for “The” will be a bit faster than a No Case search for “the”.
But Search won’t find “{{” or “}}” (or strings preceded or followed by those characters). They are ignored in the indexing of text used to construct the Concordance, just as commas, periods and parentheses are ignored.
You can, once a document is opened, use Find to search that document for “{{”.
Can you use Spotlight for such a search? The problem is that “{{” can occur in the code of PDFs and images.
Perhaps the best approach would be to export the database contents using Scripts > Export > Daily Backup and then use an external text editor capable of searching for any character in a “bulk” search.