Missing "Search For" in finder after upgrade

[ppc]

I upgraded from Snow Leopard. In the finder window sidebar, there was an extraordinarily helpful "search for" option to quickly search for items from Today, Yesterday or Past Week.

I can't find that functionality anymore in Mountain Lion. I can click "all my files" but that takes a while to load.

Attached is an image of what I am talking about.

Any ideas?

 

[rrm998]

In Finder preferences, I've set the default to open "All My Files" and then set the sort by either modified or accessed date. That way opening Finder always shows the Today/yesterday/etc. list that you are looking for.

"All My Files" should be driven by the background spotlight search threads so it should be instantly available.

If you do a Cmd-Space to open the Spotlight search, does it say it's still indexing or anything like that?

 

[Graig]

No search for in my finder sidebar either. Running mountain lion. I did not notice when this went missing. I can not get it back.

 

[rrm998]

After upgrading to ML, I found that Spotlight wasn't indexing. The usual method of trying to fix spotlight is to add the entire disk to the privacy list in spotlight configuration and then remove it to cause a full reindex. This did not work for me.

The mdworker processes for user _spotlight in activity monitor were not running. This made me think it was not turned on for some reason. I found commands to be used in the terminal to manually re-enable spotlight and that worked.

Here's a link about turning spotlight on or off:
http://osxdaily.com/2011/12/10/disable-or-enable-spotlight-in-mac-os-x-lion/