Search not working-Sequoia 15.1 Update

Rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac

Rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac - Apple Support (CA)

15.2 doesn't fix the problem, or it doesn't retroactively fix the problem and I doubt it fixes future problems (i.e., where a volume stops indexing...again).

It's 3 jan 2025 and I'm debugging my issues with a 3-volume RAID, an external TB box with 6 drives (and 6 volumes), and the internal and external SSDs.

A couple minutes ago, I ran mdutil -as to see if the posted status would give me useful info. All volumes except /Preboot (and a network drive which we'll ignore) have the status of "read-only". But the man page doesn't say what this means, so it kind of looks okay? Nor does the man page tell you what you could get back, so I don't know what's normal.

One other thing that I have not seen in this thread IS from the man page, and that is "indexing will start/restart upon mounting a drive". So for those cases where the volume in questions is not your boot drive, you can unmount and remount to get indexing started. Like in my case.

To experiment with one of the suggestions, I went into Terminal and ran sudo mdutil -Ei off <volume> and picked one of my 6 drives. I also unchecked all "search results" boxes in the Spotlight System Settings. Then I entered sudo mdutil -Ei on <volume>. (Note that, yes, I did not need to include "E" again.) Then I hit cmd-spacebar to see if there was a progress bar: there was, but it was fully blue so I thought it was almost done--which I didn't believe. Then I remembered the System Settings and I checked all the things I wanted indexed. Ran mdutil -as and the one drive now had the status Indexing enabled. Checked the Spotlight results (cmd-spacebar) and now the progress bar was like 5%.

But like others, I have had volumes or even just folders stop indexing, and dragging into the Privacy box and out again doesn't seem to help, or be persistent. I have tons of bad aliases that are not easily removed because you have to click each one and select "Delete alias..." which it doesn't do immediately like you'd expect. Hopefully, running mdutil -E (etc) will, starting from scratch.

Finally, the man page says "indexing may be delayed due to low disk space or other conditions." But it doesn't say what other conditions could exist. It also doesn't inform you HOW to check if low disk space is the current condition. It should NOT be the case for all of my volumes...but might be on a 10TB drive with 6-9GB free?

KenMacirish:

Wow, thank you. This worked (for now). And it was easy. Thanks again.

1) Launch the Terminal.app (Just copy/paste the string starting with sudo.... and press return)

2) Stop Spotlight and remove the indexing: # sudo mdutil -i off -E / <return>

3) Enable it again by typing: # sudo mdutil -i on / <return>

I found this solution - it restored my mail search instantly. I had tried the things listed here, even chatted with Apple support - no joy. So here's the answer:

miner2008

User level:

Level 1

34 points

Posted on Oct 8, 2019 5:17 PM

This solved my problem. My search was broken too. I followed the stop/start spotlight as mentioned in the post above and the search is gradually coming back to normal. I think Spotlight needed a kick to get moving.

Summarizing from the link:

1) Launch the Terminal.app (Just copy/paste the string starting with sudo.... and press return)

2) Stop Spotlight and remove the indexing: # sudo mdutil -i off -E / <return>

3) Enable it again by typing: # sudo mdutil -i on / <return>

That doesn't solve the problem. tried it multiple times.

I saw this:

To fix, he had me open Terminal:

• sudo mdutil -Eai off 
• sudo mdutil -Eai on 
• mdutil -as

I Tried it.

It seems to have indexed my 8TB Mac drive (it took a long time).

It hasn't relinked my stranded aliases.

There was just an update to Sequoia yesterday to 15.2 and it is supposed to take care of these Spotlight search issues. My issues transcended the solution posted here and for the past 10 days, I've been working with a senior Apple tech who had to go to engineering to fix the problem. They told me this system update should do the trick. I hope it works, so if you haven't already you should probably run the update and see if it fixes things.

To recap, none of the solutions permanently fixed my instance of the problem, except for the combination of erasing the metadata (variations on mdutil -E) AND a reboot. Only doing the former did not fix all drives and the problem came back, but rebooting fixed Spotlight on all 10 volumes. One of the most important facts is that Spotlight rebuilds start whenever a drive is mounted (which means you need to either unmount it or reboot), so I recommend the reboot path occasionally.

Also, @Shasha_UA's suggestion is not a Finder menu item, but rather the second suggestion from @AlWeir's link. I looked in the menus because there was no context and that seemed the logical place to look. First.

There are several things you can try:

1) System Settings > Spotlight: make sure Events & Reminders is checked

2) System Settings > General > Login Items & Extensions > "Open at login" panel

de-activate items and extensions that could interfere with the indexation such as a VPN and CleanMyMac.

It doesn't mean you can't use them but at least you can activate them only when you need them.

Same thing with System Settings > General > Login Items & Extensions > "Allow in background" panel

3) System Settings > Internet Accounts

Within Calendars, switch off all your internet accounts (for iCloud and all the others you have)

4) restart your computer, revert to step 3) and switch back on the Calendars you want. This should do it.

I use a app called FAF (Find Any File) off of the App Store. I find it better than Spotlight.

OS Sequoia 15 stopped indexing - I turned OFF Apple Intelligence in System Settings, restart - reindexed. Fixed

I rebuilt the index and that fixed it.

this is the fix https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAg8-0nx80I another user posted

I have/had the same problem. I rebuilt the index per the directions here and that worked, but every few days it stops working. The only thing that works quickly to reset the search index is to reboot my computer. Is there a quicker more permanent solution? Needless to say, I use search constantly and this is a huge pain.