Client-side Search on TEXTAREA fields

I’m going mad here - I’m trying to do a client-side search on a Long Text Area field in a table, but no results are ever returned.

I know I could do a server-side SOSL query instead, but speed is of the essence in my application.

Have I missed something really obvious?

Thanks!
Linus

Client side search does not crawl RTF’s.  Sorry.  Server side SOSL search does if you make the search go against any text field.   This may not be acceptable because it might return lots of false positives. 

Thats the current situation.