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lorifejes Author

Level 1

10 points

Indexing/searching doesn’t work anywhere

I am having problems, mostly on my Mac Air 2022. Whenever I search Spotlight, Finder, Mail, iMessage, Notes, or even Siri, it turns up either no results, or does not turn up what I am looking for.

Example, I have a pdf on my computer called research.pdf, which I knew for a fact I named as such. I was searching both Finder and Spotlight for "research.pdf". Finder turned up nothing, Spotlight turned up anything but. Then when I scroll down far enough in my downloads folder, I eventually found the file manually. (I then marked it with the orange tag, and after that all other orange tag files lost the orange tag... but one problem at a time.)

I have checked my Spotlight Privacy settings and nothing is prevented from being indexed. I can’t think of any setting I changed to have disabled an efficient and/or correct searching function across all these apps but it is becoming increasingly frustrating and an obstacle to my work.

MacBook Air, macOS 15.3

Posted on Mar 21, 2025 3:18 PM

Similar questions

1 reply

6x6

Level 7

26,777 points

Mar 21, 2025 3:38 PM in response to lorifejes

Hello lorifejes,

Try to rebuild the Spotlight indexes by executing the following commands one by one:

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

The rebuilding will take a few hours to a day or so.

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Indexing/searching doesn’t work anywhere