Spotlight not searching my addressbook contacts

I have just started experiencing this exact problem. Spotlight will not find any individual contacts in my Address Book. It will however find contact groups by name (not by the contents). I have also reindexed all Spotlight data using the technique mentioned here:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2409

I’m now performing a manual reindex using: *sudo mdutil -E /*

I’m stumped.

Manual reindexing did not clear up the problem. However, I have noticed that certain contacts do appear in Spotlight results. For example, there are six contacts in Address Book with “Pamela” as a first name … but only one of them is currently returned by Spotlight.

I have now removed the entire Spotlight index directory on my startup drive using the following commands:

*sudo mdutil -i off /*
*sudo rm -r /.Spotlight-V100*
*sudo mdutil -i on /*

The drive is being indexed from scratch.

I will report back on whether this finally clears up the issue.

Nope. That didn’t work either.

Huzzah! I discovered the cause of the problem. The inconsistent Spotlight search results were due to incomplete vCard data stored in the following folder:

*~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/Metadata/*

I have over 1,500 contacts listed in my Address Book, but only a handful were appearing in Spotlight. I thought it might have something to do with an Address Book specific index or cache. Opening up *~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/*, I noticed several legacy index and db files, obviously leftover from previous OS updates. I deleted these, but there was no change in Spotlight’s behaviour.

Then I noticed the /Metadata folder.

There were only a few dozen vCard formatted files in the metadata folder, and interestingly enough, these records corresponded to the names that I could find using Spotlight.

I quit Address Book, moved the /Metadata folder to the desktop, and relaunched Address Book. After opening Address Books’s prefs and closing them again, all 1,500+ metadata files were created.

I’m not sure why this would have happened in the first place, but it was fixable.

After reading Grant's post I looked at my metadata on two machines and found it similar.

I also ran the spotlight query 'kind:address' which returned different but incomplete results on the two machines.

My fix (after backup, duh) was take one machine and export the entire address book in archive format, then immediately re-import it. This fixed the Spotlight Address Book searches.

I had to repeat the action on my second machine - MobileMe sync improved searching on the second machine, but left it still incomplete.