Anybody having issues with Google Drive files not showing up when searching in Spotlight?

Safe Boot, (holding Shift key down at startup), does the problem occur in Safe Mode? Could take 10 minutes.

Safe mode attempts to repair Disks & clears lots of caches & loads safe Drivers, & prevents loading of 3rd party extensions, so if Safe Mode works try again in regular boot.

Manually Rebuilding Spotlight via Terminal

If the aforementioned Spotlight control panel approach doesn’t spur a reindexation of the drive, you may need to initiate it manually through the command line. Open Terminal and use the following command string to do so:

sudo mdutil -E /

This basically asks for temporary super user status, which is why Terminal may ask you for your password (it may not if you’ve used a sudo command recently or are already logged in as a super user or root. The command asks the unix tool mdutil to reindex the spotlight database for everything on the computer, including external drives, mounted disk images, etc. To re-index only for a specific drive, use the /Volumes path. For example, for an external drive named “MiniMe,” the command would look like this:

sudo mdutil -i on /

Rebuilding a drive index can take a long time, so be prepared to wait whether you do it through the System Preference panel or the command line.

If still need be…

Open Terminal and run each of these one at a time

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user

sudo /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -kill -seed -lint -r -f -v -dump -domain local -domain system -domain user -domain network

killall Dock

sudo mdutil -E /

sudo mdutil -i on /

Rebuilding a drive index can take a long time, so be prepared to wait whether you do it through the System Preference panel or the command line.

I wrote a rather scathing review against Apple and Google for what seemed like a problem that could not be fixed. Thanks to user Maremota, I was lead on a path to fix the problem. Maremota provided me with a command to find out if indexing was turned on or enabled. To do this follow the following directions: You have to go the applications folder, go to Utilities and then Terminal. Terminal is the app where you put in computer programming type commands. Don't be afraid to do this.

In the Terminal command; see, first, if Indexing is enable or disabled by typing in:

mdutil -s /Volumes/GoogleDrive/

If enabled, your Google indexing should work. If it is disabled, then type in:

mdutil -i on /Volumes/GoogleDrive/

NOTE, this command did not work for me, but I suggest you try it. It may work for you.

The following commands did work for me (I found these commands on a different site):

cd /
sudo mdutil -a -i on

I hope this helps. I spent many hours and a great deal of money performing a work around for this. I ended up getting rid of Google as a my cloud drive and going to Dropbox. But now I can use both.

Good luck and thanks to Maremota for his/her great reply.

"This is a big deal against using Apple Mac products. It essentially forces you to not use Google drive. There seems to be no way around this problem and Apple is seemingly doing nothing to address it. . . . . . There is a workaround. If you mirror the drive, you will be able to search using Find."

I disagree with this in a number of ways.

The problems with Google Drive for Desktop are real, but this is a Google product, not an Apple product. Mirror did not help, in my experience. This design flaw in Google Drive was confirmed by my IT Help Desk and several users.

There are absolutely alternatives. In my case, I abandoned Google Drive and went back to DropBox and it has all of the functions that I need. I get 2 TB of storage for $10/month, which is totally worth it, and the desktop app lets me keep all of my files on my Mac harddrive. Spotlight works with DropBox the same way that it worked with Google Drive before Google Drive was "upgraded", There are other cloud services, but i had experience with DropBox, so it was an easy transition.

I have never had a storage limitation problem with my Mac. If I did, I'd use an external hard drive (which I already use for backups). They're cheap and have huge capacity.

Google support informs me that due to changes in SMB port handling or something that Google Drive indexing "may or may not work" and they may or may not fix this in the future. They suggested I send feedback for having search be a feature request and that I should try to convince them "so that the Engineers can see the value of this feature".

I think Google Drive is likely to not be a viable solution on macOS anymore unless you can live with cloud-only search.

For some reason, recent versions of google drive don't seem to support searching in Spotlight very well anymore. On my Macbook, Spotlight supports files in my own google drive ( only if mirrored!), but that does not work on shared drives anymore. It degraded only recently. I have Google Drive Version: 52.0.6.0 now.

"If you can’t find your documents in Spotlight, it might well be that their indexing is disabled."

https://wikitwist.com/indexing-google-drive-in-spotlight-for-mac-os/

I have the same problem as the original poster. However, Spotlight doesn't work for me in Safe Mode. This problem doesn't seem to be unique to me:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/is-spotlight-supposed-to-work-in-safe-mode.1993016/

I'm using Mac OS 10.14.6. (I realize that it's an old version, but if I upgrade any further, Adobe CS4 won't work anymore.) According to the post on MacRumors.com, Spotlight used to work with Mac OS versions prior to 10.11.6 (El Capitan) but doesn't work with El Capitan or (from my experience) Mojave.

Am I missing something?

I think Microsoft One Drive still works and iCloud Drive should work.

It seems like all the cloud providers are moving to some type of attached network drive instead of an integrated folder like Drop Box used to do (not sure if they still do).

Box.com forces you to use their own search algorithms that requires an active internet connection to search your computer, only returns 50 searches, doesn't allow limiting search scope to a folder, and can't do boolean operator search.

All the cloud services seem to want you to live exclusively in the cloud and preventing on-device search may be part of that mission.

Thanks, Scott. I figured that this was a known issue, since it occurs on both of my MacBook Air laptops.

I have my Google Drive through the University of Minnesota and submitted a ticket to their help desk. U of M IT may have more leverage than we do, since they represent over 40,000 users. But I don't know if they'll push this issue aggressively or if 40,000 users is enough to make a difference in Google World.

Any recommendations for a replacement cloud service which would retain Spotlight indexing? I get Google Drive for free from the U of M, but free is pretty expensive for a service that doesn't work.

Thanks, Scott.

Do Microsoft One Drive or iCloud Drive let the user keep a mirror of their files on his/her hard drive? I suspect that I need that if I'm going to search the contents of the files. I also want to be able to work off-line, which I can't do with my iPad unless I download all the files that I'll need in advance.

It doesn't surprise me that cloud providers want to force their users to be totally dependent on their services. Apple used to have that same philosophy with iPads, tying files exclusively to the apps that created them. That's been changing (and needs to change more), making the iPad much more useful. If the cloud providers start losing users to competitors who react to what the users want, maybe they'll be more responsive to people other than their own engineers.

This is a big deal against using Apple Mac products. It essentially forces you to not use Google drive. There seems to be no way around this problem and Apple is seemingly doing nothing to address it. Imagine having a computer that you can't search for documents in Find. That is a basic and essential function of computers and has been for years. There is a workaround. If you mirror the drive, you will be able to search using Find. But here is the problem, Apple discourages buyers from buying computers with large capacity hard drive space because they want to force people into the cloud (aka Icloud) to store documents, likely to generate more income (or more skeptically -- to keep on eye on the documents of the sheeple). The price of buying a computer with let's say 4tb-8tb is prohibitively and unrealistically expensive given the low cost of SSD drives. So you buy a computer with only a half a terabyte or a terabyte, and soon find you can't use it anymore because you've maxed out on storage. It forces you to use cloud storage. Google drive is one of the main companies out there with Onedrive and Dropbox being others. I had to switch over to use Dropbox which robs me from some integration functionality with some programs I used with Google drive. Apple and Google need to correct his problem with a major major sense of urgency. This issue will hurt Apple's reputation.

Sorry everyone, I wrote about a fix stated above. If it worked for anyone, I would be surprised. I thought it worked for me, but I was testing on a MacBook Pro with the google drive downloaded on the computer which mirrored the Google Cloud version. When I tried the code-fix on a computer where my Google drive was solely in the cloud and NOT on the computer, it did not work. I could not perform a search on the Google drive. Apple and Google have to get their acts together; this is a big deal problem as many people are relying on the cloud for their files given the small spaces allotted for hard drives on sold computers.

I disagree with Adambadadam's post on a number of levels, not least that the cost of 8TB of good quality SSD is prohibitive. Apart from that, who needs it when the cost of mirroring a google drive is a few GB. This is a trivial post and unhelpful.

And you've tried the above things?

Both allow local downloads I believe.