Spotlight Does Not Display Folders

Hello everyone,

I noticed about a month or two ago that Spotlight was not displaying many of my files anymore, mostly just webpages and PDFs.

After searching on these forums and elsewhere online, I came across the problem of indexing and having to force Spotlight to re-index my drives.

I did so via the Spotlight preferences (add, then delete the folder in the Privacy tab) but nothing really came of it. I did manage to have Spotlight display files from my secondary hard drive (the other is simply a boot SSD) once again, but that really only came after I deselected PDFs from 'Search Results' in the Spotlight Preferences and rearranged the order of the file types.

(PDFs were consuming my Spotlight results, taking up about 95% of the list. Even for searches like 'Music' where my music folder should show up, I was getting a list of PDFs containing the word 'music' somewhere in them.)

The main issue I have now is that Spotlight does not display folders unless I specify kind:folder in the search bar. Folders used to pop right up, but now it's just the files within them. It doesn't matter if I put Folders at the top of the Search Results list, they aren't showing up. Ever. Unless I specify kind:folder. If I click 'Show All in Finder' to bring up the Finder Search, the folders are all there, but not in Spotlight.

And to add to that, often only subfolders show up in Spotlight but not the containing folder. For example: If I had a folder named 'Reports 2013' and subfolders for each month, January, February, March, etc... will show up but not the 'Reports 2013' folder. Once again, it's right there in Finder Search, but not in Spotlight.

I want to see folders without having to type in kind:folder first. What can I do to fix this?

Thanks in advance.