Magento CatalogSearch Model Problem - Unable to use loadByQueryText();

You are able to tell Magento with field to use on load. The following code should allow you to tell catalogsearch/query to load by the query_text attribute.

$querymodel = Mage::getModel('catalogsearch/query');
$querymodel->load('test 123','query_text');

I've done the following in order to debug:

$querymodel = Mage::getModel('catalogsearch/query');
$querymodel->loadByQueryText('test');
$data = $querymodel->getData();
print_r($querymodel->getData());

And if the record exists, the output is:

Array
(
    [query_id] => 54120
    [query_text] => test
    [num_results] => 1
    [popularity] => 1
    [redirect] => 
    [synonym_for] => 
    [store_id] => 6
    [display_in_terms] => 1
    [is_active] => 1
    [is_processed] => 0
    [updated_at] => 2013-01-08 03:55:26
)

In your code if (!$querymodel->getId()) { should be if (!$querymodel->getQueryId()) { or look at the value returned by $querymodel->getData()

I ended up getting it working in a less clean way - no idea why the loadByQueryText() method is stuill not working.

$querymodel = Mage::getModel('catalogsearch/query')
    ->getCollection()
    ->addFieldToFilter('query_text', 'testing 123')
    ->getFirstItem();

This returns a result so I'm gonna use it.