New Spotlight not working on El Capitan

When I go into System Preferences, Spotlight, Privacy Tab, and try to add my "Macintosh HD", I get an error message stating that "The item couldn't be added or removed because you don't have the appropriate permissions." I do have admin privileges, but apparently only 'system' has write privileges.

And therefore, my iMac will not re-index. 😟

Updated from yosemite, not working in my rMBP as well. Tried english and local search no response. All items ticked in spotlight settings. I think it is not ready outside US. Location: EU

It is declared on el capitan page footnotes as well:

Some features may not be available for all countries or all areas. Click here to see complete list.

Apparently there are some restrictions to where the enhancements are supposed to work, in terms of both search language and location:

https://www.apple.com/osx/feature-availability/#spotlight-suggestions

Thanks, but for me this worked for all of 1 minute. I also saw new icons appear at the bottom of the spotlight window, indicating that I could search for Movies, Music, Stocks etc. After a short while - the icons disappeared and I was back to doing local searches. So in my case, it likely has something to do with my region being blocked from using these "privileged" features. From what I found out, Spotlight suggestions is limited to only a handful of countries which can be found here: http://www.apple.com/ios/feature-availability/#spotlight-suggestions-spotlight-s uggestions. Pity, not sure why they have such an awesome feature, presented with so much fanfare only to be limited to a few.

Same problem here, it does not display anything. It only looks for files on my computer. Maybe there is something to be enabled idk. Want to use that, is my favorite feature of this update, really useful.

I'm having problems with that as well. To test it, I typed in "weather in Chicago, IL" and got nothing. It's not a deal breaker by any means, it seemed like a fun idea, but we shall see if anything ever comes of it.

Same here. Searching for Weather New York, or any other city weather simply searches within my local files, just like Yosemite Spotlight. Stocks doesn't work either. Not sure about other "smart" searches.

timojaask wrote:

Same here. Searching for Weather New York, or any other city weather simply searches within my local files, just like Yosemite Spotlight. Stocks doesn't work either. Not sure about other "smart" searches.

How about if you search instead of weather, for ex "weather houston TX"

Not working for me either...... I have tried tons of combinations of stocks/weather/sports... and all the ones you suggest and that articles reviewing the spotlight feature suggests.... How unprofessional apple. A few days ago, my morning phone alarm did not work (IOS 9.0), which made me miss work, and now I have just updated my macbook to an apparently buggy OS X -- that makes me feel really safe about that too.

Maybe its overdue to go back to Windows, they actually made some quality work of Win 10 (Win 8 was horribad though), unlike what this seems to be 😟 I miss Steve behind the wheel....

Just wanted to add that it is not just weather, etc not working: the natural language search also fails to be recognized, so searching for "files created today" or "emails from XYV received yesterday" brings back normal search results.

This is ironic.

I'm having the exact same problem. Spotlight is only searching in local files.

Had the same problem with the beta on an old macbook pro retina.

And now on a brand new macbook pro retina (only el capitan installed).

All checkboxes in Preferences -> Spotlight are checked.

Both Spotlight and Spotlight networking is showing 0 bytes sent/received in activity monitor. Can someone verify? If spotlight is at least trying to get the results we would have non-zero sent bytes even if some server's overloaded right?

Thanks for the tip on changing Region. I see why this workaround might work, but that is pretty annoying. Why should we mess up our regional settings just to make one trivial feature of OS work properly?

Changing region to US is not enough. Your device must present physically on US territory.

OSX Maps app checks your location, then even you have changed the region in Preferences, you'll don't reach working Spotlight search as it was described in Apple ads.

Just try to connect your device to some US server trough VPN, and you'll see weather forecast in Spotlight window.

BTW obtaining an US IP-address is not enough too. OSX checks your router's MAC-address, so you have to look for some new virtual router to reach your goal.

Too mutch for so small benefit I guess.