Truth to be told, every game has a manual, and smarter, intelligent games teach you the intricacies of it's system as you play through it without you even noticing.
The party search feature goes completely unexplained and unadvertised in the game, so unless you decide to go hunting stuff down in your menus you won't notice it exist.

Hell, for all the discussions about anima all over, a friend of mine did not even KNOW teleporting existed the way it does until the day he was really pissed at having to make a gigantic trip and I told him "Why not just use anima?" and he went "Wait, what is that?"

(given, that friend is kind of spacy but even so)