Spotlight not finding documents on Mac despite indexing
Tahoe not finding documents. Indexing did not work
[Re-Titled by Moderator]
Original Title: Spotlight
This did it! Thank you!
Question marked as
This appears to be a bug in macOS Tahoe. It persists even after rebuilding the Spotlight index. To fix the issue, what worked for me was to launch Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor and force quit the Spotlight and spotlightknowledged processes (they will reinitiate themselves). After that, Spotlight searches worked properly, and continue working after rebooting, etc.
(If you prefer and know how, you can also use Terminal to kill Spotlight and related processes.)
34 replies
Thanks a lot. Worked for me on MacBook Pro 14 M3.
Solved my issue. Thank you!
I recently bought a new mac and restored my files from a time machine backup. Not sure if this had anything to do with it.
The real issue here is not Spotlight the search-and-index facility, it's Spotlight the interface thingy that you search in.
If I use the Spotlight interface (the funny little windoid that pops up in the middle of the screen, described at Search for anything with Spotlight on Mac – Apple Support (UK)), the thing I want doesn't come up, and the list is very limited.
But if I use Spotlight the technology (e.g. using a third-party interface like my NotLight utility, or even just using the Search field in a Finder window), the search succeeds just fine.
If you insist on using the Spotlight interface, it might help to put a `kind:` specifier. If I'm looking for a Louise Penny epub book and I just ask for "Louise Penny", I get nothing useful. But if I say "kind:epub Louise Penny", there they all are.
Spotlight not finding documents on Mac despite indexing