Spotlight Privacy Is Working Opposite of How It's Supposed To

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Level 1

13 points

Spotlight Privacy Is Working Opposite of How It's Supposed To

Weirdest issue.

I have a folder in my Documents folder. Searching the exact name of it would never bring that folder up.

So I added the entire Documents folder to the Privacy list in the Spotlight prefs, then quit System Preferences to let the change take effect. Did a test search in Spotlight just to confirm, and the folder shows up in Spotlight! Even though the Documents folder is listed in the Privacy list of "do not search" in Spotlight preferences.

To confirm this bizarre behavior, I removed the Documents folder from the Privacy list in Spotlight prefs, quit System Prefs. Searched for the folder by name and it did not appear in the results. Re-adding Documents to the privacy list once again resulted in Spotlight showing the folder when I search for it.

Any idea what on earth to do about this? I find I have more problems with Spotlight, both on iOS and Mac OS—it just never seems to work for me reliably.

MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 10.15

Posted on Aug 13, 2020 1:45 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

sterling r

Community Specialist

Aug 14, 2020 6:06 PM in response to MossRockss

Hi MossRockss,

We do understand, and we're happy to help with this trouble you're having with the Spotlight search not working correctly. You've done some great steps to isolate this issue, so let's look into it a little further. We'd like to have you rebuild the Spotlight index to get the search results working as expected. Follow the steps here:

How to rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac

Let us know if this helps, or if you run into any further trouble.

Have a great day!

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Answer 2

Old Toad

Level 10

215,196 points

Aug 14, 2020 6:14 PM in response to MossRockss

Try excluding the entire drive and then un-exlude it while excluding the Documents folder and see if that will remove the previous indexing of the Documents folder.

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Answer 3

MossRockss Author

Level 1

13 points

Aug 20, 2020 9:53 AM in response to Old Toad

Thank you Old Toad! That's almost exactly what I did—excluded my entire home folder, then rebooted I think, then un-excluded it. After that, Spotlight reindexed and now things show up. Hope this is helpful for someone else who might run into a similar bug!

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Spotlight Privacy Is Working Opposite of How It's Supposed To

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