Spotlight is a train wreck

[inkswamp]

WTF happened to Spotlight? I upgraded to Yosemite last week and it's overall a great experience but Spotlight is a disaster. Anyone have any tips for recovering whatever's left of it in Yosemite? I've come to rely on Spotlight over the years and Yosemite has rendered it slow and stupid (but oh so pretty... thanks, Jony. )

I suspect a good part of it is the largely unnecessary web searching it does. Anyone know how to disable that completely? I've disabled everything I can in the Spotlight preferences (such as they are) and it doesn't seem to have done any good.

 

[fisherking]

no issues here. are you sure it's not still indexing?

 

[SlCKB0Y]

Anyone have any tips for recovering whatever's left of it in Yosemite?

What's left of it? It's been significantly extended in Yosemite and pushed to the forefront as a feature. Every review i've read has been enthusiastic about the changes and I agree.

 

[KALLT]

It appears slower than in Mavericks and I think that it is intentional.

When you start typing, Spotlight will select only the top hit. It will give you a list with other results only after a slight delay. This is different from how it worked in Mavericks, because there you would get all results immediately. So if you have a work flow of using Spotlight to access a list of things quickly then that has become slower. In addition, Spotlight’s UI is a lot bigger than before, which results in fewer results per view and a lot more scrolling.

I honestly want the old Spotlight back. I don’t care about web searches, I will never get used to doing a web search outside of my browser. I want Spotlight to be snappy and show me everything at once, with minimal scrolling.

 

[jbarley]

Spotlight is working well for me, so well in fact that I no longer miss or feel the need for any of the 3rd party apps I used to use such as Alfred, Launchbar or QuickSilver.

 

[snorkelman]

Suggestions and Bing should be the main spotlight options to uncheck (those are the only two net based ones I remember from running 10.10)

I'd love to know the genius that decided you'ld click something up in top right hand of your screen and unlike every other icon in that area the dialog for it would appear in the middle of your screen.

Probably same person that thought putting Show all in Finder at bottom of the search results rather than at the top was a good idea (when the most likely time Id use show all in finder is when theres a big sozzling list of results to plough through and Id rather not scroll down them lol)

 

[Partron22]

I suspect a good part of it is the largely unnecessary web searching it does. Anyone know how to disable that completely?

System Preferences : Spotlight pane.
Uncheck "Spotlight Suggestions" and "Bing Web Searches".

Of the 22 checkboxes in the pane, I've only left 10 checked, and Spotlight is now pretty frisky.

 

[SlCKB0Y]

II don’t care about web searches, I will never get used to doing a web search outside of my browser.

You can turn the web stuff off. From Help pages:

Turn off Spotlight Suggestions and Bing Web Searches
Choose Apple menu > System Preferences, then click Spotlight.

Open Spotlight preferences for me

Click Search Results, then deselect Spotlight Suggestions and Bing Web Searches.

Spotlight will search the contents of only your Mac.

 

[KALLT]

You can at least turn the bing stuff off:

Yeah I know, but that is why I don’t really see the benefit of the new Spotlight. For my purposes, the old one was just better.

 

[jbarley]

.

 

[Zenton]

Spotlight is a train wreck

I'd love to know the genius that decided you'ld click something up in top right hand of your screen and unlike every other icon in that area the dialog for it would appear in the middle of your screen.

Probably same person that thought putting Show all in Finder at bottom of the search results rather than at the top was a good idea (when the most likely time Id use show all in finder is when theres a big sozzling list of results to plough through and Id rather not scroll down them lol)

Agreed. It's annoying to have it in the very middle of the screen. Example: there's some numbers in a document that I'm reading. I want to quickly add them up > open spotlight > it blocks the numbers and I have to start fiddling with window placement.

The "Show all in Finder" thing is also annoying. It's more time consuming. Also I liked single click to open up something from spotlight better than the current two clicks.

Edit. typo

 

[hers]

Man spotlight was so nice in tiger. I remember people being so jealous of it like damn why can't mine do that. Now it's been a train wreck since lion. Pretty much like the OS. IMO.