The Sand Village's intelligence had yet to arrive.
Generally speaking, the Five Great Shinobi Villages possessed extremely powerful intelligence networks. They might not have been completely omnipresent throughout the shinobi world, but they were close enough. Take Konoha, for example. Konoha had been tracking Orochimaru for a long time, and it seemed they had never achieved much, but that required distinguishing how much manpower and material Konoha had invested in the matter... In reality, Konoha had handed the entire matter over to Jiraiya.
It would be inaccurate to say that Konoha did not take the matter of dealing with this particular rogue ninja seriously. After all, they had assigned Jiraiya—a combatant of the same level, whose overall abilities were even more comprehensive than Orochimaru's—to the mission. But if one said Konoha took the matter very seriously, they had indeed handed it entirely to Jiraiya without assigning any other ninja.
Put simply, Konoha had not made capturing Orochimaru its top priority as a village.
In the original story, it was only after the Konoha Crush plan, the death of the Third Hokage, and Orochimaru's subsequent clash with the new Fifth Hokage that this lack of attention changed. Konoha then began sending large numbers of ninja to search for Orochimaru's whereabouts.
After Konoha abandoned its original practice of slacking off, its intelligence gathering and search for Orochimaru's whereabouts became remarkably effective.
By extension, if Sunagakure devoted all its efforts to a matter, there was no reason for its intelligence capabilities to be much weaker than Konoha's.
And so, several months passed. Just as Yuhara thought that this so-called joint mission request would fizzle out because of Sunagakure's lack of ability, he suddenly received word from Sunagakure... There had been progress, and Sunagakure hoped he could head to the Land of Wind as