Yosemite Finder Search Not Working

Not fixed for me. Same problem. Not updating any other of my Macs to Yosemite anytime soon. I can honestly say I feel like I'm back on a PC again with all these problems.

Just checking in to confirm that it is indeed NOT fixed in 10.10.1.

It works now for one or two searches versus breaking immediately. However, if you stick with it long enough, it will eventually fail just as it did before.

The process you describe does not solve this problem. As previosuly discussed, rebooting the system does clear the system of the bug that prevents finder from working. I suggest that this is why you may have thought your process had solved the problem.

It has been suggested that the problem is with indexing, which can sometimes be resolved by placing your entire "MacintoshHD" location in the privacy tab of spotlight and then removing it in order to prompt OSX to re-index the drive. This does not appear to be the solution to this issue however.

And yes, this issue still exists with the latest version of Yosemite (10.10.1). The only bonified, absolute, and permanent way to prevent this is to revert to OSX Mavericks, but this is not a solution to the problem in Yosemite - just the only way to avoid the problem until it is solved. Not sure why this issue isn't being picked up more. Perhap's most people use Spotlight search instead of Finder.

Same here. Apple, please fix this. It messes up search in a lot of applications including Mail and Coda.

Same problem here (I think).

The searches seem to work fine on the main hard disc of my macbook pro, but any drive I use in USB will not work (I have NOT put them into spotlights exclusion list).

This is pretty poor really when removable drives are so big now yet I have to search manually to find things. None of the solutions in this thread have worked for me even partially. File searching is a BASIC requirement of a file handling interface like Finder (which currently seems a rather ironic name).

Please fix this as a matter of urgency or provide a work around. I have far too much data to search manually and I am not too keen to do this by some fancy command line method..

I have to add that the workarounds posted by me and others are not fixes: they are merely temporary workarounds, and may not work in all cases.

Another not entirely satisfying solution is to use a third-party software. EasyFind (the one with a squirrel icon) has proved to be very fast for me.

I have submitted a bug at Apple (ID 19205314), but unfortunately making them reproduce the bug systematically will be difficult. Apple asks for the following :

I may have found a fix.

My brand new MacBookPro Core i7 had exactly the same symptoms. No updates or so, just migration from my previous Mac on a brand new one with Yosemite. However the migration went wrong, and I had to import all my stuff manually, worst thing my many email folders.

Anyway after some work I was all set (and I had the latest version of both OS and installed software) but Spotlight (which is vital for me) was misbehaving, ranging from finding only a very limited subset of files to finding nothing. Weird thing, logging in with a new administrator account would find all files in my main account in a warp.

Tried obviously several restarts, and rebuilding the index both from terminal (the "sudo mdutil -E /" command suite that can be found anywhere) and by dragging the Macintosh HD icon in and out of the privacy tab in Spotlight preferences (the apple recommended procedure, they should be equivalent, anyway). The rebuild of the index was very long, but Spotlight would work briefly during and after that, and then stop again.

I went through the Apple assistance. They made me remove spotlight .plist files and some other folders in the myusername/Library/Preferences folder and even in /Library/, they made me start in safe mode and repair permissions with diskutil. They made me rebuild the index again, no luck (actually some of this messed up my Xorg badly, and I had to reinstall it).

Here is what finally fixed for me.

I went in mail.app (whose search was totally misbehaving too), and I rebuild all the mailboxes in my accounts. (Select all the folders, "Folder" menu, "rebuild")

When this finished, I rebuilt my index again, restarted and... it is working like a charm since then!

So maybe it's a bug that stops the whole Spotlight from working properly if the mailboxes are messed up. Guess why...

Hope it helps someone, ciao.

Well just installed 10.10.2 and Finder is still not doing its basic job of Finding files on external volumes.

Using cmd-F to get the drop down box, selecting "Kind is -> Music", on an external USB drive containing only 12,000 music files, finds precisely nothing.

Using the search box instead for filenames finds nothing at all also. Its as if Finder thinks the volume is empty when doing searches.

This is stupidly frustrating when it works fine with the internal drive no problem.

Thank goodness for Easyfind. But a BIG shame that Apple need 3rd party suppliers of free software to make their flagship OS usable 😟

Yup, entered this and all was well. Strange that it wasn't working on 10.10.3

Hi,

I had a related problem with MacOSX 10.10.4, when using Finder search, and wanting to search in the folder I'm in, no results whatsoever. Searching 'This Mac' worked though.

First what I did, I found here (Yosemite Finder Search Not Working), but no result.

-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.

I rebooted, but searching in the folder I was in, still did not work.

Then I thought, maybe it is related to some Finder settings, so I opened the Finder Preferences, and opened the Advanced Tab and saw the setting 'When performing a search' with a drop down menu. I changed this setting from 'Search this Mac' to 'Search the Current Folder'. Now Finder search does what I want.

So for me the problem has been solved now. I hope it helps you.

Greetings Peter.

Thanks, well detailed. Unfortunately hasn't resolved my issue.

My opinion every OSX relaese since Snow leopard has been a bug ridden piece of ****. I've spent more time bug fixing and researching since Snow Leopard, than actually being productive, even though my knowledge of OSX has grown massively.

i'm having the same problem and nothing work out with me, any solution from apple?

With reference to http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/stopspotlightindex.html use the following commands in Terminal

sudo rm -rf /.Spotlight-V100

sudo rm -rf /.Spotlight-V200

sudo mdutil -i off /

sudo mdutil -i on /

sudo mdutil -E /

Seems to have worked for me after upgrading to Yosemite