Anyone else having these problems since updating to Yosemite? I can't seem to find anything via the search box in Finder. Spotlight works fine though.
MacBook Air (11-inch Mid 2013), OS X Mavericks (10.9)
yep!...same for me.
I cannot sort through my e-mails in MS Office '11 Outlook or anything else using the search folder in Outlook or using Spotlight, all since I installed Yosemite today.
Same here, search inside current folder doesn't return any results at all.
/* Edit */
Just looked at Spotlight properties in System Preferences and saw that the folders I was trying to search were inside the Privacy tab. I thought Finder search was different from Spotlight, but apparently not...
A restart solved it for me, however - if you have smart search and search in there and then search in Finder - it won't work again and restart would be needed. So there there is a bug related with smart search and regular search - at least for me.
You don't actually need to reboot.
Open terminal and type "sudo killall mds".
This kills all of the mdd-related processes. Searches will again work...for about 30 seconds.
This is extremely frustrating.
How is the solution you propose (restarting your system) a solution?
It is not a solution, a solution is when Apple provides a fix for this. This is a workaround that worked for me.
What is Terminal and how do you open it?
SOLVED. (Well, a temporary work around)
After calling Apple, walking through a few things, I finally figured out how to get Finder with the highly buggy OS that is known as Yosemite.
Here's how to do it:
-Go to System Preferences, Select Spotlight, then click the Privacy tab.
-choose your Mac HD (so the idea is you want to exclude your entire HD from the Spotlight search)
-Quit System preferences
-Reboot.
Go ahead and open Finder when you've rebooted.
I also went back, removed the Mac HD from the Exclusion list, restarted and now Finder seems to be working normally.
And this was after backing up, reinstalling everything, etc. What an ordeal!
By default, Terminal is found in Applications | Utilities. The icon is a black square with a white "greater than" sign and an underline.
Unfortunately, this did not work for me.
Excluding the system drive from Spotlight resulted in Finder search not working at all. In fact, I didn't even see any disk activity. It's like the Search field was disabled completely.
Re-adding the system drive brought back the same broken behavior as before. Basic search works fine but any type of filtered search simply sits and spins.
You're absolutely right. Spotlight search becomes completely disabled when you do this - didn't mean to infer otherwise. The only thing this workaround does is allow me to navigate files and folders via Finder as I was getting the same sit and spin icon when trying to navigate any folder. Very, very frustrating bug.
Just updated to 10.10.1. Problem appears to be FIXED. 🙂
I have exactly the same problem, after upgrading from 10.6.8 to 10.10 AND updating to 10.10.1
Typing sudo killall mds worked for me.
My mac is a bit old (2009), so I suspect that one or several search functions are running in background, and become unresponsive after a while.
Actually, that's killing the process /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/Metadata.framework /Versions/A/Support/mds_stores that did the trick.
I have not tried killing mdworker alone.
Yosemite Finder Search Not Working
