spotlight will not search ANY folders- all searches not on the whole drive come up blank. Whole drive searches are useless. How to fix this?

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Level 1

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spotlight will not search ANY folders- all searches not on the whole drive come up blank. Whole drive searches are useless. How to fix this?

New Macbook pro running Ventura 13.5.1

I can't get spotlight to function except via whole HD searches- not folders (any), not mail. Bookmark searches in Safari also don't work. this is handicapping me at my job and I need a fix. I have double-checked Spotlight privacy settings-- nothing is private (or ever was). I have tried using terminal to re-index, using "sudo mdutil -E /" and then entering my password-- It didn't re-index, just gave the immediate response "indexing enabled."

Please help.

Posted on Sep 17, 2023 12:51 PM

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Answer 1

Sep 17, 2023 1:43 PM in response to Clare in Chi

On my Desktop, I have a folder named PDF and within that folder I have a file named bar.zsh. The following Spotlight (case-insensitive) search finds that bar.zsh (kind is "Zsh script") under category Developer in the list of results:

(kind:folder AND name:pdf) OR (kind:zsh AND name:bar)

This is proof that Spotlight indexes all folder hierarchies and that I can find a single file in a designated folder with the correctly refined Spotlight keyword syntax. Apple has an article on narrowing one's Spotlight search results.

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Answer 2

Sep 17, 2023 1:05 PM in response to Clare in Chi

Firstly, I would update to the latest version of Ventura which is 13.5.2. Then if that doesn't fix it, do an actual re-indexing per this article:

➡️ Rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac

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Answer 3

Barney-15E

Level 10

117,202 points

Sep 17, 2023 1:14 PM in response to Clare in Chi

Fix for Finder Not Showing Folder Search … - Apple Community

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spotlight will not search ANY folders- all searches not on the whole drive come up blank. Whole drive searches are useless. How to fix this?

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