@techee thanks for the explanation, the plugins "project file patterns" are there to define where you tag parse for symbols I presume, not really anything to do with searching. So a separate setting is perfectly fine.
So yeah it would be an enhancement for PO to add its own search mechanism using its own settings to avoid Geanys search, which tries to be helpful to beginners with a partly GUI driven search, but that makes it unsuitable for your purposes.
Lemme say on your behalf "pull requests are welcome" :)