Went to the payee view.
I did a search in the payee list for a substring. I got a whole bunch of hits : good.
The resulting list appears to contain payees that have no transactions associated with them - I figured that out by searching for * in transactions (got the 35K+ entries) and sorted by payee and did not see the payee. This is probably by design.
If I click on one of the entries for which I know there are no transactions, the list of transactions in the right pane is not refreshed to show empty, but rather still shows the list of transactions from the previous payee.