Search not working in Monterey

Thanks Chingachgoook for posting this useful work-around. Can't help but feel angry about the fact that we fork our north of 2 grand on a new MacBook Pro and then need to waste time trying to figure out work-arounds for fundamental OS functions. And the deafening silence from Apple on the subject....

Thanks. My problem is across the board in Mail and notes. Search works i Finder and Spotlight. But I do business via mail and have hundreds of notes that I need to access quickly. We need a fix for Monterrey. Quickly.

One additional note: I did take all of the files in the directory in question and place them directly under the top level - so, all 14,185 files (it turns out) in a single folder. Search still worked OK. I ended up sorting them into several subfolders under the main folder, just to make it easier to navigate. Again, searches are still working with that file configuration.

I had the same problem on my 2022 MacBook pro, M1 Max but I just solved it.

Open system preferences.

Open Spotlight.

Click On privacy.

Add hard drive to window (prevent spotlight from searching these locations).

Close window

Reboot.

Now repeat the above but remove hard drive from the window (prevent spotlight from searching these locations)

Hey Presto, it should work but if not, reboot.

I understand it reindexes the drive. It might take a while if you have a lot on it.

Good luck.

I was one of the posters who had no apparent success with re-indexing. I suspect the fix actually is a re-index, but some of us had to go to great lengths to get an index rebuild to actually happen. In my case I had performed the 'privacy, reboot, remove from privacy and another reboot' sequence without any luck. I had to do a massive re-org of the file folder configuration and that, it seems, finally successfully triggered a full index rebuild. At least that's what I saw on my system. No doubt details in our different configurations affect this process, factors we did not mention but did cause us to see different apparent results.

Found this:

https://www.stellarinfo.com/article/rebuild-spotlight-search-index-on-mac.php

and followed the instructions to force a rebuild via the Terminal.

It returned this:

/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist: service already loaded

Load failed: 37: Operation already in progress

In other words, Monterey is *supposedly* trying to re-index – FOR THE PAST MONTH.

I can't pull all my documents out of their folders to force a re-index, I don't have months to rearrange my (very expensive) new Mac. GRRRRRR.

So grateful, Bike-turkey - your fix of re-indexing the hard drive on Spotlight worked for me! I had migrated over from a 2015 Mac with Catalina to the new M1 Macbook Pro and thought at first it was an Outlook issue (I still run "old" Outlook, as I use an Exchange server for one email account and can't afford to have issues there, as mentioned previously on this board), but this board helped me see my search issue in both Outlook and File Finder was actually the SAME issue, not 2 issues: the Spotlight bug in Monterey. I did what you suggested above (go to System Preferences-Spotlight-Privacy, add hard drive to area not searched, then remove it), rebooting in between the adding of my hard drive to search exclusion (as you did) and removing it, then made sure my computer stayed out of sleep mode for at least an hour overnight to rebuild the index. This morning my life is MUCH better.

FYI, Microsoft support has a thread up that says Monterey 12.1 fixes the problem - https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/search-in-outlook-for-mac-returns-no-results-after-installing-macos-monterey-12-1-075c5f09-35db-4205-aba3-eea2f168c71b - this was NOT true for me. Also, as with folks above, I was running Outlook 16.57, and my system said I was up to date, so I couldn't easily get my hands on 16.58 to try that possible fix. So glad I tried this first. Hope Apple fixes it SOON. How frustrating.

It may be that most people have solved this now. I had the same problem, with my new Mac (Dec 2021) iOS Monterey 12.0.1.

I just saw the update for Monterey 12.2 today, Jan 27, and it fixed my search problem in Finder. I don't know about Outlook, as I don't use it.

Thanks DeborahMagid and others. This worked for me.

I had exactly the issue described , and, due to the search on the whole Mac working, I couldn't believe that the Spotlight Index was at fault. But it was...

I tried rebuilding the spotlight index, and it worked for exactly one search in the folder. Then I wasn't getting results again. I cannot rebuild the spotlight index every single search. This is not a long-term solution. Apple needs to fix this issue. This is also an issue on a brand new MacBook Pro

I have the same situation in my mackbook 14

Spotlight search not working in Current Folder after rebuilding Spotlight index - using Monterey on MacBook Pro 14.

I have the same problem. Rebuilding the index doesn't work for me. I have a brand new Macbook Pro but searching in the finder doesn't work. Is there a solution? An update perhaps?

Thanks but didn't help.