Big Sur Spotlight broken

[Maclife80]

Spotlight search is not working in Big Sur anymore. I cannot get any results for applications and files it is really annoying.

I did already all the common things like reindexing via terminal and the system preferences nothing seems to be working

any solutions or help regarding this ?

 

[gilby101]

What do you get after running the command "mdutil -sav" in Terminal (without the quotes)?

 

[Makk1000]

Most likely that it will state that indexing is disabled on various disks, at least mine did.
use:

sudo mdutil -a -i on

To enable indexing on all disks

 

[Maclife80]

ok got it back to work

sudo mdutil -Ea
sudo mdutil -ai off
sudo mdutil -ai on

 

[zenabi_99]

ok got it back to work

sudo mdutil -Ea
sudo mdutil -ai off
sudo mdutil -ai on

After a week of searching and trying "fixes" with no luck, this worked like a charm! Much appreciated!

 

[donblanco]

ok got it back to work

sudo mdutil -Ea
sudo mdutil -ai off
sudo mdutil -ai on

THIS

FINALLY

Why can't Apple's own support people manage to reply with these simple commands on their own KB???

 

[Fomalhaut]

To add to this, I found that when I ran "sudo mdutil -sav", that /System/Volumes/Data had indexing disabled.

I had previously just tried to rebuild the index on the root "/" volume with "sudo mdutil -E" and then toggled the indexing with "mdutil -i off /" and "mdutil -i on /".

However this is not sufficient because (I presume) the APFS volume has multiple volumes and I was missing the "Data" volume.

Once I enabled this, I was able to search for files on my internal SSD again. Hurray!

 

[LizKat]

I have so far resisted upgrading my 2020 MBA to Big Sur, not having done a lot of homework about effects on stuff like multiple Music libraries, impact on relationships to mobile devices of various vintage and so forth. Found it somewhat distressing to drop in here meaning to scout around for reasons to go ahead already, and then to bump into this thread first off the bat.

But at least there's a solution to the posed problem re Spotlight, so on with my mission which amounts to hoping I can find no good reason not to upgrade to Big Sur at this point. After all I'm sick of ignoring the updates-available badges and nudges I've been getting from Catalina for what seems like ages now. Maybe it's past time to make an extra clone of my existing setup to an external drive, and just get on with the upgrade.

 

[rebbi1]

ok got it back to work

sudo mdutil -Ea
sudo mdutil -ai off
sudo mdutil -ai on

OMG this fixed it. Using the old method of adding and removing items from Spotlight Privacy preferences did zilch. But these terminal commands worked and now my Spotlight is indexing!

 

[Maclife80]

Unfortantly exactly the same issue now after upgrading to macOS Monterey. And even with the commands it is not fixing it

 

[HDFan]

Why can't Apple's own support people manage to reply with these simple commands on their own KB???

They are not allowed to use terminal commands except maybe in rare cases. It is too risky as a lot of damage can be done if one uses the wrong command or argument, eg. rm -R. If there is a problem it needs to be fixed using the OS GUI. I am sure that a lot of support folks could do it, but there are others who would not understand it. Ensures a more consistent support experience and the need to train personnel on effectively another OS.