Sequoia Spotlight missing in Action!

[haralds]

Spotlight constantly forgets where Apps and files are. I have reset it several times (Onyx, Command Line, Dragging into the Private folder and removing it from there,) but quickly it again reverts to just showing Safari items.

Has anybody else seen it? Has anybody found a permanent fix?

 

[4nthony]

Spotlight used to be so reliable. Now, it struggles finding anything. For example...

No clue why it won't find the string I'm searching for when the string is in the name of the file.

Like you, I've gone through all the steps to rebuild the index. Nothing seems to help. It was helpful that it found the string inside one of my notes, but finding the actual files would've been better.

 

[haralds]

Same here! I use Cmd-Space to launch apps, and I now constantly have to reset Spotlight on 15.3.1.

 

[Flyview]

Noob question but is the Finder search also dependent on Spotlight indexing? i.e. if you were to turn off Spotlight completely would searching for files by filename in Finder still work?

 

[OldMacs4Me]

Noob question but is the Finder search also dependent on Spotlight indexing? i.e. if you were to turn off Spotlight completely would searching for files by filename in Finder still work?

My understanding is that both Finder searches and TimeMachine are dependent on Spotlight. Spotlight lasted less than a day on Sequoia after two search attempts I decided it was totally useless. Spotlight is missing two very important abilities. One is scheduled indexing, the other is limiting the metadata index to only the files you want to search.

That said I do not use TimeMachine and have kept Spotlight disabled all the way back to Tiger. When I need to do searches I use FindAnyFile. Highly recommended! If you recall OS-X Panther, FAF does searches in exactly the same way and yes it's fast. And it will search locations that Spotlight will not.

NOTE: System updates will probably re-enable Stoplight so you'll have to disable it after the update along with turning off Apple Intelligence, Wifi.....

 

[Flyview]

My understanding is that both Finder searches and TimeMachine are dependent on Spotlight. Spotlight lasted less than a day on Sequoia after two search attempts I decided it was totally useless. Spotlight is missing two very important abilities. One is scheduled indexing, the other is limiting the metadata index to only the files you want to search.

That said I do not use TimeMachine and have kept Spotlight disabled all the way back to Tiger. When I need to do searches I use FindAnyFile. Highly recommended! If you recall OS-X Panther, FAF does searches in exactly the same way and yes it's fast. And it will search locations that Spotlight will not.

NOTE: System updates will probably re-enable Stoplight so you'll have to disable it after the update along with turning off Apple Intelligence, Wifi.....

How are you disabling Spotlight? I noticed the search in Finder doesn't like to give me folder search results from /System. For example searching for "AssetsV2" does not show me the folder at /System/Library/AssetsV2 even if I manually open up the System folder first. Sigh... But it can apparently see into my screenshots and find that I had taken a screenshot with that text in it!?

 

[OldMacs4Me]

How are you disabling Spotlight? I noticed the search in Finder doesn't like to give me folder search results from /System. For example searching for "AssetsV2" does not show me the folder at /System/Library/AssetsV2 even if I manually open up the System folder first. Sigh... But it can apparently see into my screenshots and find that I had taken a screenshot with that text in it!?

AFAIK This has to be done via the Terminal app in sudo mode. In Sequoia I believe you probably also have to disable SIP first. You can probably re-enable SIP after disabling Spotlight but I am not 100% sure.

If you feel comfortable with that I'll be happy to post the command line sequence.