New Spotlight not working on El Capitan

I finally ... at long last ... got Spotlight to work. Here is what I did ....

Opened System Preferences. Clicked "Spotlight" to open it. For "Search Results" I clicked all the categories so they will appear in Spotlight search results. At the bottom of the window I clicked "Allow Spotlight Suggestions in Spotlight and Look Up". I then closed System Preference for Spotlight. I then clicked the Spotlight Icon. At the top Spotlight displayed icons for various apps including Safari. I then entered, into Spotlight, such things as "AAPL" and "Weather Chicago" and "Chicago Cubs". In each case, Spotlight displayed the appropriate result.

So now it's working. HOWEVER, it's still not working for natural speech searches.

Hope my fix works for you.

Jim Minor

I have the same problem here in the UK, Apple states that Spotlight functions will work in the UK, but they don't.

Also my Spotlight has frozen twice, and is now stuck with a blue icon, and I can't type, so looks like a reboot, must be a bug, so I will report it.😟

Spotlight continues not to work for me. I've followed everyone's suggestions on how to get it to work, but it just won't. It only searches through my documents for the words I inputted (like "weather Chicago"), rather than showing me the weather forecast in Chicago.

Same here. Based in UK. When I connect via a US VPN server and set my system settings to US, it works. In any other case, it does NOT.

Which is very weird - given Apple advertised the enhanced Spotlight functions in all countries, including their UK, German, etc websites.

If this is only supposed to work in the US, clearly misleading advertising.

This is strange, I'm in the UK and Spotlight would not work as apple suggested , so I went into Preferences and Spotlight and ticked the only unticked box ,"Spotlight Suggestions" and now its working.

Mine was the same this morning I went to system prefrences , spotlight, privcay tab, then added my HD confirmed ok left for two minutes then removed. Forcing a reindex. Unfortunately El Capitan does not show it,s actually reindexing. After about 5 minutes I typed in weather London and Spotlight sprung to life also you can see the reindexing bar below the search

Same problem. Nothing populating the search tool. No indication that it's even trying except to find items on my machine. No weather, stock info, sports, news...nothing. Is there a setting or on/off toggle? Looked and can't find it. Even tried the Spotlight Search to find it! Ironically ineffective.

Got a retina MBP 15" from the UK with all the UK settings. Using it in Malta and not seeing any of the new El Capitan stuff. Tried using Tunnelbear to proxy my location to UK/US but no luck, maybe the location check happens on startup or so.

I'm guessing someone just needs to create an app that spoofs your location for Spotlight.

It's quite annoying really. If I can speak/write English but am outside of the US, why should I not have access to all this magic? I can understand natural language not working for other languages but based on location...

I checked the Bing Search in System Perference>Spotlight but nothing have changed, would it be able to change the default search provider such as Google or Duckduckgo? Because actually if this thing works, I think the Bing can't go as well as Google.

I found in my case, that the indexing service was not enabled. Once I enabled it, spotlight now works!

$ sudo launchctl load -wF /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

$ sudo mdutil -a -i on

If you do not wish to enable indexing on all drives (with the above command), see the man page for the mdutil command.

**Also of note**

When I restart my iMac, spotlight briefly indexes for a minute or so before it starts "working again".

I created a clean install of El Capitan on a fresh VM and it behaves in the same manner. Only the VM is finished indexing in less than a minute. I am guessing that is because I only have the OS installed and no other programs.

Hope this helps!

Mark

Your spotlight is not working at all? I had to give my Mac a little while to finish indexing the first time. Also, whenever I restart, it re-indexes for a few minutes, but works fine after that.

I Created a virtual machine with a clean install of El Capitan and it behaves in the same way. Only takes less than a minute to re-index as I only have the OS installed.

I Once had an issue with El Capitan running very slow. Especially at boot up! Found an article that said to boot up in safe mode, then shut down and power my Mac back on. Haven't had the slowness since.

This may be a little left field, but I had a serious problem with Spotlight and it's now fixed.

I upgraded to El Capitan and found Spotlight was not working properly. In particular I couldn't search my Mail at all and this was pretty desperate as I use it for work.

Despite trying everything to re-index, following the usual steps like trashing my Envelope folders and even using Terminal to re-index I was getting desperate as Spotlight still didn't work.

On a hunch I removed a third party software bundle - MailTags - from my Library [I'd download the supposedly El Capitan version] and immediately Spotlight re-indexed and everything worked fine, including searches in Mail

So it was MailTags that had apparently screwed up Spotlight.

I haven't re-installed Mailtags as even thought I think I could fix Spotlight again - by removing Mailbags - I can't see the point of taking the risk.

True. But the Apple documentation does not mention anything about the simple web searches working only in selected countries. This has been the case already in Yosemite: the spotlight does not search anything outside the mac itself, only results from local documents, mail, etc.are shown.

rmjamieson wrote:

I finally ... at long last ... got Spotlight to work. Here is what I did ....

Opened System Preferences. Clicked "Spotlight" to open it. For "Search Results" I clicked all the categories so they will appear in Spotlight search results. At the bottom of the window I clicked "Allow Spotlight Suggestions in Spotlight and Look Up". I then closed System Preference for Spotlight. I then clicked the Spotlight Icon. At the top Spotlight displayed icons for various apps including Safari. I then entered, into Spotlight, such things as "AAPL" and "Weather Chicago" and "Chicago Cubs". In each case, Spotlight displayed the appropriate result.

So now it's working. HOWEVER, it's still not working for natural speech searches.

Hope my fix works for you.

Jim Minor

It actually works, well for me anyway.

Specific locations don't work eg, "Weather Perth, *specific town* "

But a main state works, eg, "Weather Perth"

Even if it doesn't work, just use 2 fingers from the right to make the notification panel appear, and you can check stocks and weather there. 🙂