Spotlight not searching in text documents

In System Preferences > Spotlight > Search Results, I have every category selected except Siri Suggestions. If you haven't previously, open that Spotlight Preferences > Privacy panel, drag and drop your Desktop Macintosh HD icon onto it, wait 10 seconds, and then select it, and click [-] to remove Macintosh HD. Quit System Preferences.

At this point, Spotlight will begin indexing your drive for the Search Result categories that are selected. Your Mac will slow during the indexing process and you can observe its progress by launching the menu bar Spotlight icon. Here, I have chosen to locate PDF documents, and you can see the indexing occurring:

When the Spotlight indexing is done, and assuming that the text file that you are attempting to match a word too is on your Macintosh HD startup drive, you should have similar success as I demonstrated, provided that your search string exists in the document. Words with white space in them will need to be double-quoted to be found.

Perhaps for you, but not me. I can Spotlight search a text file and find the word that I am looking for in Monterey 12.0.1 with the following:

kind:text "lensmake"

That lists the exif.txt document on my Desktop that contains the EXIF metadata for an image, and the keyword LensMake is in that document.

I have another text file on my Desktop that has a "|" punctuated header fields, one of which contains "price":

kind:text "|price|"

and that document is the first in the found list.

"At this point, Spotlight will begin indexing your drive for the Search Result categories that are selected. Your Mac will slow during the indexing process and you can observe its progress by launching the menu bar Spotlight icon. "

Um, nope. I've tried this 3 times in the 2 weeks since I bought a new MBA that runs Monterey, and it still doesn't work.

I'd be grateful for any other ideas.

You are welcome.