Spotlight not working on Big Sur?

Did you drag and drop the startup drive's icon from your Desktop into the System Preferences : Spotlight : Privacy panel, wait 10 seconds, and then select, and remove [-] it? That would start Time Machine indexing your startup drive, and then like mine, you should have an indexed drive, with successful Spotlight searches.

I have the same problem, no utilities application (textedit, terminal, calc, etc....) in spotlight

I build index every day but the problems persists

reindex, reset nvram, reset smc : no issue

help...

Thank you Truckster,

Your advice worked for me. I turned off the Wi Fi. I accessed the Disk Utility ran "First Aid" and away we went. I have Spotlight back and working.

Again thank you so much for working out a fix AND for posting the fix :)

With spotlight and finder search issues, also some problems with photos, I noticed that time machine has troubles loading past backups. So I ejected time machine, restarted the Mac, and spotlight, finder and photos are now working as they should. I guess I need to figure out how to fix the backup drive.

hooe this helps

An excellent app to have and a workaround till your Spotlight issue is resolved is the share ware app Find Any File.

FAF can search areas that Spotlight can't like invisible folders, system folders and packages.  It is limited to file names only, however.

Thanks for the info. I have reindexed many many times by excluding the drive and removing it. After full index, results are similar but oddly, not the same. It seems to randomly index my database files. Catalina was never a problem. All the best, Jim