missing handler _search in couchdb

I'm currently using nano to interact with couchdb in node.js. This is how I insert a document:

    var user = {
     'name': 'Neon',
     'age': 12, 
     'type': 'user'
    };
    db.insert(user, function(err, body){
        if(err === null){
            response = {
                'type': 'success',
                'message': 'User created'
            };
        }
        res.send(response);
    });

And then I created a view that will return only the documents whose type is 'user':

db.insert(
  { "views": 
    { "by_user": 
      { "map": function(doc) { 
        if(doc.type == 'user'){

            emit([doc.name], doc._id); 
        }
      } } 
    }
  }, '_design/people', function (error, response) {
    console.log("yay");
});

But when I use the view to further trim down the results:

   db.search('people', 'by_user', {'age': 16}, function(err, body) {
     if (!err) {
        res.send(body);
      }else{
            console.log('eror occured');
          console.log(err);
      }


          res.send(response);
        });

I'm getting this as a response:

{ [Error: missing handler: _search]
  name: 'Error',
  error: 'not_found',
  reason: 'missing handler: _search',
  scope: 'couch',
  statusCode: 404,
  request: 
   { method: 'GET',
     headers: 
      { 'content-type': 'application/json',
        accept: 'application/json' },
     uri: 'http://root:nitoryolai@localhost:5984/chatapp/_design/people/_search/by_user',
     qs: { name: 'wern' } },
  headers: 
   { date: 'Fri, 27 Mar 2015 07:50:06 GMT',
     'content-type': 'application/json',
     'cache-control': 'must-revalidate',
     statusCode: 404,
     uri: 'http://root:mypassword@localhost:5984/my_db/_design/people/_search/by_user' },
  errid: 'non_200',
  description: 'couch returned 404' }

Any ideas what I'm missing here? Thanks in advance.