Insert Special Character - Search by description of character missing

Question

Hi Google experts!
I usually utilize letters like A, a, n, S, s, etc with markers  like "acute above", "dot above", "dot below", "macron" and I always search those by describing them like "a macron", then a list with some characters matching the description appears and I choose which one I'd like.
But those descriptions of the characters are gone, and the only thing that the have is the unicode, and the only way to lookup for those chars now is by drawing which is annoying and time consuming :/
I'm using Win 10, Chrome browser.
Do you have any ideas of how to to solve that?
Thanks!
PS: here's an example of the search, showing the char w/o description. not possible to search by keywords.

Jo S. · Accepted Answer

Thanks for checking, Gill. I tested this the other day and it wasn't working, but it appears to have been fixed now. Felipe, is it working for you now as well?
~Jo

Stephanie X284 · Accepted Answer

Jo,
I also had a question about the italics button disappearing. It was marked as a duplicate of this one.
In case anyone has redirected here and needs help with the missing italics issue, for me the solution was to adjust the size of elements on my screen. I have a Samsung Galaxy S20 and I found the option in Settings -> Display -> Screen zoom. Mine had been set to the middle of 5 settings, making it one smaller did make the italics button reappear. I never changed that setting so I'm not sure why it suddenly became an issue but at least that fixed the problem.

Will Van; Bacon Penguin · Accepted Answer

It appears to happen on and off, at this point, you're better off just writing the documents with placeholders for the symbols and a reminder to replace them once the search tool starts working again; I'm currently facing the same issue now and have tried to restart both chrome and my internet to no avail.
*It also appears to be a very recent issue and I believe it may have came with whatever update added the 'blocking' feature for Drive in general. I mean, I can't think of a scenario where I'd even need that feature but sure; it's more trouble than it's worth.
**Actually, I'm not sure if even this is broken, but you can use 'Tools' --> 'Preferences' --> 'Substitutions' to create unique sequences to create any special characters you need for example I have ^o-^ be what turns into my ō and ^*mult^ turn into my ×; from there it's a matter of copy-pasting to all the spots you need it.
It's also what turns --> into → for most users and what makes fractions like 1/2 to ½ possible. In addition to that, it's where all custom auto-corrections are listed.
You may also choose to use the Ctrl + H 'Find and Replace' option to replace a premade sequence all at once.
The problem with all of these is, of course, that you must have a space separating the sequence (you can't just have T^o-^h^o-^ for example) because Docs needs to recognise it as a separate 'word'; that means no spaces in the actual sequence either unfortunately.