Help needed - limit Spotlight to ONLY indexing Applications

[Leon1das]

BigSur 11.2.2
Hi all - need to limit Spotlight.
I need it only to index Applications and stop indexing EVERYTHING else.
I tried - but somehow it gives me only access to System (preinstalled apps) but nothing of the ones I installed.

Could someone experienced with this - help posting exact paths of all folders to exclude in Spotlight / Privacy tab to achieve showing Apps only.

Massive thanks..

 

[BrianBaughn]

May I suggest…don't use Spotlight for this. What I do is use Launchpad, which only shows apps. I don't have Launchpad in the dock, however. I have, in System Preferences>Keyboard>Shortcuts>Launchpad & Dock, added the key combination Control-Space for "Show Launchpad" so that's it's just as easy to get to as Spotlight.

So now, to start an app, I press control-space and start typing the name of the app and Launchpad begins narrowing them down.

You can also, for apps with two or more word names, type one of the words other than the first one. For some names this narrows it down more quickly. Another method is to type the first letter of the words in a multi-word name, or the capitalized letters in a one-word or multi-word name.

 

[TETENAL]

System Preferences->Spotlight->Search Results

Uncheck everything but "Applications". Doesn't that give you what you want?

 

[Honza1]

Somehow I do not think you can prevent indexing. Too much of macOS relies on Spotlight knowing "everything". This includes Time machine, Mail, or Siri, for example.
You can limit what is returned to you in search as TETENAL in post above shows. But that really limits only what is returned to you in search, not what Spotlight indexes.
Your description seems to suggest, though, that you have non functioning Spotlight. In this case you need to rebuild the Spotlight database. You can find instructions on line, but I prefer to use OnyX which is GUI based free app which triggers various system resent/rebuild commands. You can run maintenance and rebuild various cache/databases to fix broken ones. Easy for human to do.

 

[HenryAZ]

BigSur 11.2.2
Hi all - need to limit Spotlight.
I need it only to index Applications and stop indexing EVERYTHING else.

I wonder if this would work, using Terminal:

sudo mdutil -i off /
sudo mdutil -E /
sudo mdutil -i on /Applications