Also, I find that the search often wants to search my capital, even when I have other, unsearched provinces. I have got the latest patch and I thought this was sorted out. Running on PC
Yes. If a province has been searched to even 1 level in a particular path, the autosearch won't target it.
Which may be what was happening with Voice of Tiamat above? If any of the 4 elemental paths had been searched, I'd expect Voice to skip it. Haven't tested this, though.
Doh. I just reported this in the bug thread. Is that WAD then? Seems pretty mad that if you've searched to lvl 1 they are unwilling to set a lvl4+ auto search on it.