ooops, yes, the search and replace tool is older than the character styles in scribus...
i guess that since so many people complain about the searching and replacing (most of all because it does not allow to search the whole document!) nobody wants to spend time on fixing such "details"...
the day i will have figured out how i can implement a new search and replace that works on the full document, i will do so :-)
but i'm not there yet...