Yosemite Spotlight "Search web for..." ?

[AspectRatio]

Hi there. Long time lurker, first time poster. Please be gentle.

I updated from Mavericks to Yosemite today, and despite all the rave reviews of how powerful Spotlight is, I'm finding it to be rather crippled...

in Mavericks, I could type anything into Spotlight, and if it couldn't find it on my Mac, I had the options "Search web for ____" and "Search Wikipedia for ______". Even if I typed gibberish I could still initiate a web search from the Spotlight search field.

But now, in Yosemite, I can only initiate a web search if the search string is "valid", by which I mean, already matches something or is a word or phrase that spotlight recognizes.

tl;dr version:

Mavericks: Spotlight > "slkjhkajhkjahs" = "Search web for slkjhkajhkjahs"
Yosemite: Spotlight > "slkjhkajhkjahs" = "no results found."

Am I missing something, or did Apple break one of my most-used features?

Thanks for listening

 

[Chabba]

Same issue here.

Web search within Spotlight doesn't work.
I'm in the US, System Preference set to US region.
Location services on.

It only searches my hard drive, nothing web based.

 

[Vegasryn]

Go to system preferences and then Spotlight.

Drag "Bing Search" towards the top of the list. Then when you type anything random, you will see bing search results

 

[GrumpyTrucker]

I'm having the same issue and I did that and still nothing. It's not a deal breaker but it is irritating

 

[AspectRatio]

Go to system preferences and then Spotlight.

Drag "Bing Search" towards the top of the list. Then when you type anything random, you will see bing search results

That's not the problem. The problem is, I want to be able to type anything into Spotlight and perform a web search. See the attached screen grabs. In Mavericks, Spotlight would let me search the web for "blargh". Now, it's a dead end.

 

[GrumpyTrucker]

Oddly, I just did a search for contact in Spotlight (just typed the first name "Mike") and there were 3 Bing results there for people called Mike. Nothing else I have typed into Spotlight - including other contacts - has made a Bing search appear. It gets odder by the minute.

 

[Jeff Flowerday]

Yep, spotlight is basically useless for search the internet.

 

[ABC5S]

This is what I get

 

[simon48]

Alfred can do it.

 

[yesjam]

Hate this limitation as well. This reminds me of when Mission Control replaced Expose and we lost keyboard functionality for window-switching within the interface. So irritating.

 

[simon48]

Hate this limitation as well. This reminds me of when Mission Control replaced Expose and we lost keyboard functionality for window-switching within the interface. So irritating.

I know I posted this above, but have you tried Alfred? It's free, and it works very similar to Spotlight. If this is really something that gets to you, give Alfred a shot.

 

[godpod]

Support for Spotlight - Feature Availability

Check if your country is listed here in Spotlight Feature Availability page for iOS8... This should be same for OS X Yosemite as well... https://www.apple.com/ios/feature-availability/#spotlight-suggestions-spotlight-suggestions