I have a 2013 MacBook Pro. I live in the United States.
Spotlight simply will not search the web or show Bing search results. All the boxes in spotlight preferences are checked.
When I uncheck everything except Bing result, Spotlight still will not search web or show bing result.
Advice?
MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013), OS X Yosemite (10.10)
Same problem here (iMac 2013, in the Netherlands). Bing web search is on top of the list in preferences, but no web searches. Even stranger, when I type "Elephant" the first result is "Energy Saver".
Earlier someone nail it for me... this feature only works for people located in:
There is a link at Apple that shows which countries this feature is available:
https://www.apple.com/ios/feature-availability/#spotlight-suggestions-spotlight- suggestions
If you are outside this countries will NOT WORK, must be GEOTARGETED by IP Address... no matter what your region or settings are.
I'm from Italy, but it does not work...
Reading the forum seem that the problem arise because i've English as language and Italy as region (in the preferences/Language & Region)...
Probably if I set Italian as language this feature will work... (or if I let English and se US or UK as region..)
Anyway I think this is a (know, at this point...) "bug", and probably (we hope) will be resolved in the next Yosemite version...
We hope that search engine will ben configurable...(for. example instead of Bing...Google...)
thanx for replying. I mean web searches (bing). Not really interested in spotlight suggestions.
I have tried all possible combinations region+language (I am greek), not positive outcome.
I mean web search too, spotlight web search does not work. (but i've not changed region neither language...)
It SHOULD work even specifying english (as preferred language) and Italy as region...
I suspect that the only solution is waiting for a Yosemite update..that will (presumably) solve the problem
I did all the above mentioned steps with no result. In the end I went into Safari preferences, selected Bing as default search engine and the issue was solved. I hope it will be useful.
Unfortunately that's not the solution. Been tested many different times.
Tried it for the heck of it again. Safari search engine to Bing and everything is enabled in Spotlight preferences - no web results.
The issue is related to language and region restrictions.
until apple desides to fix this bug you can try this plug in for spotlight that adds many thing, among which google search
The same problem here. I live in the Czech Republic and am very much frustrated with this downgrading of Apple OS X Yosemite. Switching to the same language and region, unfortunately, does not work, not even English/US. Spotlight would not search Wiki and Internet (Bing search not working). I agree, the best part of Spotlight is now being denied to us.
This is seriously the best option. I refuse to be hindered by some ideas someone had in a HQ without taking any time to understand the world. Take Europe, almost all countries have their own language. We move around a lot. This means that each time I leave my country I'll not be able to use the feature at all. I mean it's plain stupid. On top of that I'm expected to live with Bing results. The worst search engine out there.
Reming me again why I keep on paying a premium price when it seem that for each year we get more and more restricted to enjoy our products.
Spotlight worked as it should in Yosemite on my wife's MacBook Pro, showing results in all areas that were checked in her preferences. Unfortunately, it didn't do the same on my Mac Pro. Many selected searches did not show any results. So I followed your suggestion and typed rm -f ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Spotlight.plist in Terminal and restarted. That didn't work for me. So I decided to remove the file again manually. This time, I trashed not onlycom.apple.Spotlight.plist, but also com.apple.metadata.SpotlightNetHelper.plist from my user Library. After restarting, Spotlight works properly now! Web searches, Wikipedia, everything. Perhaps deleting the second file made the difference. I can't be certain. For the record, I'm running v.10.10.1 in the U.S.A. and English is my selected language.
Just a few days later and the problem has returned. Still looking for another solution.
The same problem. I live in Ukraine.
Even I am having the same problem so far, but this wasn't the case in Mavericks or previous versions.
Somewhere I read that except US/UK, this problem is faced by the users.
So, as of today, no updates ? I must say that I faced the same problem when I'm in the UK (I'm in Portugal at the moment). However, such problem does not occur on my girlfriend's account on the same computer, at least back there.
How strange is that ?
Strangely, the problem has disappeared by itself one the last few days. Suddenly I got the attached message when using spotlight (and I now remember that a few days ago I saw something similar in Safari), and now it suddenly works as advertised. I did not change anything myself, and I did not install a new Yosemite version since 10.10.2 (many weeks ago). The only thing I installed was a "security update". Hard to believe that this was the cause... What is happening? Is Apple listening to us, but they do not want to admit that anything was wrong before?
I would be interested to know if anyone had a similar experience. Or a theory why it suddenly changed. I am going to try it on a few other computers soon.
Spotlight in Yosemite will not search web
