Why is Spotlight returning no results when searching a single folder?

These are not Apple Tech Support communities so it is no wonder that those Apple employees do not participate, nor potentially learn from this source of information. Also, in a Tech support role, they are quite busy with customer contact the entire time that they are on duty and that means any learning is relegated to peer word-of-mouth, or off-hours motivation unless there are other demands on their time (like a family or life).

mbabc wrote:

Why on earth is this information still not available to tech support?

Because it's wrong.

Rebuilding the Spotlight index is the standard suggestion. However, your post and the thread you linked two are literally the only two instances that I've ever seen where reindexing the main drive worked.

So if you are tech support, and you have a troubleshooting technique that you know will fail at least 49/50 times, why would you bother with it?

Now if the Spotlight index is corrupted, then rebuilding it is the correct course of action. But that neglects the much bigger question. How did the Spotlight index get corrupted in the first place? If you can't answer than, and if you've done nothing to address that underlying problem, then rebuilding the index is only going to prolong the misery. It seems inevitable that the index will get corrupted again. Is lightening going to strike twice with the rebuild solution?

I don't know why this is such a common problem. The most logical explanation is 3rd party system modifications that corrupt the Spotlight index. After all, 3rd party system modifications are the most common cause of all problems, so why shouldn't that be true for Spotlight problems too? I've asked a few people to try disabling their 3rd party Spotlight extensions in System Settings > Login Items & Extensions > Extensions > Spotlight Extensions, but I haven't gotten any follow-up from anyone whether this works or not. Such is life here in the forums.

mbabc wrote:

Under that circumstance, would Spotlight automatically re-index or was the problem stemming from an index created under a different OS?

Spotlight normally reindexes any time there is a major change to the operating system. I would assume that an initial install would qualify.

I have noticed that when I do a mass install of multiple apps, the apps often aren't indexed at first. I've had to manually launch each app once for it to be re-registered with the operating system.

Perhaps this could also affect documents. If you had documents created by an app that isn't registered, those documents wouldn't be indexed until the creating app was added back to the system by launching it once.