What the HELL is up with Spotlight?

[baryon]

Spotlight just sometimes refuses to find any files or folders. It just declares that there are no results no matter what I type in. What the hell is going on? It was bad in Sequoya, randomly not finding files that were obviously there. But now it just can't find anything.

 

[Mr_Brightside_@]

Re-index

 

[whatnot]

the more functions they stuff it with, the more useless it becomes, but why is it showing folders in grid view, is that a default or a preference?

my pet peeve on sequoia is idiotic image thumbnails, and more often than not, if you're looking for an image, you only get the idiotic thumbnail with not even a 'search in finder' option, although the Firefox shortcut still comes on top - because if you can't find a file, you google it.

 

[Starfia]

I've experienced this too – apparently not a normal situation. Spotlight does find apps in "Apps" mode, but never returns anything in "Files" mode or "Actions" mode.

Re-indexing has never worked for me; restarting has never worked for me.

The only thing I've found that works is opening Activity Monitor and terminating every process that contains "spotlight," and that only works temporarily.

 

[wchanley]

You could try manually deleting the folder .Spotlight-V100 from your Data volume. When I've gotten Spotlight stuck and the usual method of trying to force it to re-index it doesn't work (i.e. add your internal disk to the list of excluded volumes in Search Privacy), if I manually delete Spotlight's entire metadata folder on that disk, it'll usually force a re-index for real.

I generally do it from recovery, just in case (I doubt anything catastrophic would happen trying it from your live Data volume, but I can't say for sure). Once in there, open Terminal from your Utilities menu in Recovery, mount your Data volume (usually /dev/disk3s5 if you're just running with one APFS container on your internal storage), then cd into the top level of that volume and delete the Spotlight folder.

I always change the name of my Data volume to just Data; yours may be named differently (it's "Macintosh HD - Data", with spaces (no quotes), by default).

From Recovery, try:

diskutil list
diskutil mount /dev/disk3s5
cd /Volumes/Data
rm -rf .Spotlight-V100

# Get your list of mountable volumes first, to make sure you're mounting the correct one in the
# next step. When you cd into that volume, it will be named however your Data volume is currently
# named down in /System/Volumes. If yours has spaces in the name - as in 'Macintosh HD - Data',
# tab should autocomplete it for you.
#
# Restart, and your disk should reindex correctly.

 

[rb2112]

Just confirming, you have gone into Settings, Spotlight and checked or unchecked all the boxes for files and folders you want to see?

 

[gilby101]

Re-index

You could try manually deleting the folder .Spotlight-V100 from your Data volume

I don't think this is an indexing problem.

But now it just can't find anything.

I get the same when using Spotlight (command-space) to search.

To confirm this is not an indexing issue, what happens when you open Finder and use its search (magnifying glass at windows top right). Does that find files and folders? It does for me.

I believe this is a bug in Spotlight search (not Finder search, and not Spotlight indexing) macOS 26.0.1.

Do as @Starfia says:

The only thing I've found that works is opening Activity Monitor and terminating every process that contains "spotlight," and that only works temporarily.

This works for me. Needs more testing but it might be only the process called "Spotlight" which needs to be killed.

 

[Nada Ting]

Consume this:

Last Week on My Mac: Why Spotlight can’t find some files

In macOS Mojave, Apple changed the way that Spotlight indexes the contents of plain text files. That introduced a bug that prevents indexing of any of the contents of files starting with certain ch…

eclecticlight.co