I assume you are dealing with (front end)script generated web elements, then you must need to embrace lean way of thinking. Don't try to pull out a web element by it's property alone. If you are not getting them try to build a xpath from its parent or siblings.

say, the HTML goes like this,

 <div id="somestatic id">
  <div id="xyz">
   <input name="dynamic one"/>  
  </div>
 </div>

Then you can build a xpath as ,

//*[@id='staticID']/div/input

for the HTML,

   <div id="staticID"></div>
   <input name="dynamic one"/>  

the xpath is ,

//*[@id='staticID']/following-sibling::input

similarly there are n number of option available. Give them a try

@Prophet's answer is good, but I wanted to add CSS case too since it may be helpful. You can use ^= to search for attributes starting with certain keyword and $= for attribute starting with certain keywrd and *= for attribute containing a keyword.

browser.find_element(By.CSS_SELECTOR, 'input[placeholder*="some te"]')

You can make it case-insensitive by adding i before closing the bracket

browser.find_element(By.CSS_SELECTOR, 'input[placeholder*="some te" i]')

You are making mistake with css selector. I think you forgot to put . in front of class name while using css selector.

Correct css locator would be .ember-view.ember-text-field.search

So your final code look like :

String cssLocator = ".ember-view.ember-text-field.search";
WebElement ele= driver.findElement(By.cssSelector(cssLocator));

or if you want to make it more specific then you can use:

String cssLocator = ".ember-view[placeholder='Ask me anything!']"; also

I've done similar tests. For our fields with placeholder text, the text appears in a placeholder attribute on the element. In Ruby, we use code like this:

element = @driver.find_element(*<locator string>*)
expected_placeholder_text = element.attribute('placeholder') 

That gives us a string that we compare just like any other string. You could also shorten the element.attribute call to be

element['placeholder'] 

as well, but we prefer the former (for non-relevant and completely arbitrary reasons).