Search Results in Finder No Good.

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Level 1

27 points

Search Results in Finder No Good.

When I use Search in Finder within a specified folder, my results come back with hundreds of useless files and folders from all across my hard drive. No matter what wording I try. Even the simple term 'food' for a small folder with only food related files gives me endless irrelevant results from old texts, downloads, random documents, etc... It'S searching the entire universe!! I always select a folder name, and not 'my mac' but this still happens. How can I fix this?

MacBook Pro 13", macOS 10.15

Posted on Mar 24, 2020 7:38 PM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Marco Klobas

Level 6

8,255 points

Mar 25, 2020 3:53 AM in response to peter4good

Follow this guide to narrow the search results in Finder: https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/narrow-search-results-mh15155/mac

Basically, as soon as you start searching for a file/folder in Finder, you can choose in the "Search:" section (just above the search results) to limit the searching to the current folder or to the entire Mac ("This Mac").

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Answer 2

Barney-15E

Level 10

112,668 points

Mar 28, 2020 6:09 AM in response to peter4good

I'd reindex Spotlight.

How to rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac - Apple Support

You can also use Terminal to restart the index:

sudo mdutil -E /

If you need to reindex an external drive, replace the / with the path to the external drive mount point, e.g. "/Volumes/External drive name/". If there are spaces in the name, use double quotes or escape the spaces with \ : /Volumes/External\ drive\ name/

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Answer 3

peter4good Author

Level 1

27 points

Mar 28, 2020 1:27 AM in response to Marco Klobas

Yes I am aware of how to do this, as I mentioned in original post, but my search results still include documents from all across the hard drive, even after specifying the folder. Hence my original question.

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Answer 4

Mar 28, 2020 1:41 AM in response to peter4good

Sorry, I forgot you claimed that you already limited the searching to a specific folder.

That's strange.

Try to set Finder's Preferences -> Advanced -> When performing a search -> Search the Current Folder and see if it works.

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Answer 5

Mar 28, 2020 2:10 AM in response to peter4good

Two more things:

Does searching on another partition/external disk have the same behavior?

Does HoudahSpot give the same reuslts? It's a Spotlight alternative app (still based on Spotlight index, though) that offers free trial: https://www.houdah.com/houdahSpot/?lang=en

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Answer 6

peter4good Author

Level 1

27 points

Mar 28, 2020 1:43 AM in response to peter4good

Here are the kinds of results i'm getting for the search "food" in folder "Yogafit Hardtwist". When I add criteria, results are basically the same from across many different folders (see at bottom).

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Answer 7

May 12, 2020 5:38 PM in response to Marco Klobas

I have the same problem. a search on an external disk limited to a folder returns all results on my machine, but a search on the internal disk returns results only for the selected folder.

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Search Results in Finder No Good.

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