fish for

1. Search for something, as in I've fished for it in all the drawers . [First half of 1700s]

2. Try to obtain something through artifice or indirectly. For example, He was always fishing for compliments , or, as William Makepeace Thackeray put it in Vanity Fair (1848): “The first woman who fishes for him, hooks him.” [Mid-1500s]