Comment 1 for bug 1076232

How to do this manually:

 apt-get source --download-only nautilus
extract both archives into the same folder
if you do not have unity installed, comment out the unity files from debian/patches/series
in the folder, run the following:
./debian/rules
aclocal
autoconf
automake --add-missing
UNITY_CFLAGS=-I/usr/include/libdbusmenu-glib-0.4 UNITY_LIBS=-llibdbusmenu-glib-0.4 ./configure --enable-tracker=yes --disable-unity
make
sudo make install

This did the trick for me, files search is now working great from the activities overview as well as from nautilus. I am now able to get rid of gnome-documents.

Also as a simpler workaround you can try https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/284/tracker-search/