Spotlight does not find apps and documents I commonly use

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Level 1

17 points

Spotlight does not find apps and documents I commonly use

Spotlight had worked well for me prior to Sequoia.

After installing Sequoia, Spotlight now always has a blind spot for one or more of the applications or documents I routinely use.

I have rebuilt Spotlight numerous times since installing Sequoia, but the problem continues. When I rebuild, I do so either by moving my hard drive in and out of Search Privacy in Settings or by issuing mdutil on the command line.

As an example of the problem, right now Spotlight will not recognized Terminal. When I open spotlight and type "ter", Terminal is not listed in the suggested results. In fact, when I type "ter", no applications are listed in the suggested results.

If I type "tex", however, Spotlight recognizes TextMate. If I type "fir", it recognizes Firefox.

I even added Terminal to Search Privacy and then deleted Terminal from Search Privacy, but Spotlight won't recognize it.

From past experience the last two weeks, I imagine that if I rebuild Spotlight it will eventually recognize Terminal again, but also from past experience the last two weeks, I imagine that if I rebuild Spotlight some other document or application that's being recognized now will fail to be recognized.

Is there a bug or known issue with Spotlight in Sequoia?

MacBook Air (M2, 2023)

Posted on Oct 11, 2024 12:26 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Barney-15E

Level 10

116,770 points

Oct 11, 2024 6:48 PM in response to bbincc

Which mdutil options are you using?

If you have something installed that is interfering with the index process, reindexing won't solve anything.

I don't have any way to determine what might be causing a problem, if there is one.

Going back to my first question, the -X option will delete the .Spotlight-v100 folder, so if there are issues inside it, that might fix a corruption problem. You need to check the indexing status after issuing that option as it might not restart the indexing. A restart may kickstart the re-indexing.

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Answer 2

BDAqua

Level 10

245,459 points

Oct 12, 2024 9:39 AM in response to bbincc

Have you run Disk Utility's Disk First Aid on all connected drives?

In Disk Utility>View, select Show all Devices, highlight the top left entry.

Run Disk First Aid on all items in the left panel, from top down.

Are you running any VPN, Anti-Virus, or Cleaning apps?

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Answer 3

Nov 14, 2024 9:09 AM in response to bbincc

I get the same thing. For example I type Cmd-space and then type "Excel". At the top of the list, I see a bunch of my Excel files. At the bottom of the list, Spotlight prompts me to install Excel from the App store. However, it does not recognize the installed version that is already in my applications folder.

`sudo mdutil -X /` fixed it for me.

I waited to upgrade from Sonoma until Sequoia 15.1 was out. You'd think Apple QA engineers would have had a test sequence for this after the first major revision. I certainly have better things to do than fix stuff on the command line. :-(

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