Finding a file in the past?

At some time in the distant past, I had a file, say "foo.txt", in a given folder. In the somewhat more recent past, I deleted that file.
When I enter Time Machine viewing that folder and enter "foo.txt" in the search text field in the folder's title bar, it always says "Not found"; and yet, if I manually go back in time, I eventually find "foo.txt".
It's been a while since I've actually had to recover a file using Time Machine, but I could have sworn that searching would automatically take me back in time to view the folder on the last date the file was present in it.
If that's true, then why doesn't it seem to work any more? If that's not true, is there a way to search for a file in the past?

Paul, yes, if you hope to perform any searches within the Time Machine interface, Spotlight will have had to index the backup drive ahead of time. That is why we sometimes see "Preparing backup..." for so long on occasions. Spotlight is re-indexing the backup drive before the new backup begins.
Naturally, if you find that your backup drive, when connected to your Mac, is in the Privacy pane of the Spotlight Preferences, then no indexing will take place. A by-product of that setup is that you won't be able to search the backup drive for specific files and folders.
Another factor to consider is this: When you are in the Time Machine interface, each window you see cascading off into the distance represent a single snapshot of your Macs' hard drive. Except for the first window. That represent your Macs' state as it is "Today (Now)". If you type a word in the search box while in this "Today (Now)" window, you will only get results of items that exist on your Mac today.
Now, click on the window directly behind "Today (Now)". That represents that last successful backup which may have taken place up to an hour ago. If you type a word in the search box while in this window, you will only get results of items that exist when that last backup took place. Go back farther and you will only get results from that particular backup - not the results of every item ever backed up by Time Machine.
That's why the Mac OS 10.5 Help docs states, +"Use the arrows and the timeline along the right edge of your screen to browse through the Time Machine backups. Your search is performed in every window. When you find the item you want to restore, select it and then click Restore."+
Does that make sense? Cheers!

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