New Spotlight not working on El Capitan

gooober

""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"

I upgraded my Macbook pro (13-in, early 2011) to El Capitan, and everything slowed to a crawl. After a thousand fixes, finally got it running right. However, Spotlight wouldn't show any results whatsoever, no matter what boxes were checked or unchecked. Your suggestion fixed it and it works great now. Thank you!

goober's solution did not work for me.

I upgraded to 10.11.3 several weeks ago and Spotlight seemed to be working. Today it doesn't work. Sometimes it does nothing when I type in a search term, at other times it shows an icon on the extreme right of the Spotlight search box. The icon looks like an app avatar (for example a chat icon or a computer to computer transfer). If I search a term it will return a message box that says Chat does work with this version or you don't have permission. I have used the Spotlight system preference to check every option on the list. I have also tried to add a folder and remove it but the system isn't allowing me to add anything to the Privacy list. I'm stumped.

I am also getting extremely frustrated with Mac OS X. With every revision it adds useless features and more and more bugs. It is the new Microsoft IMHO.

I have fixed mine with:

sudo mdutil -Ea

sudo mdutil -ai off

sudo mdutil -ai on

Got it working. I'm in USA but it wasn't working until I opened System Pref, Spotlight settings, unchecked (OFF) "Allow Spotlight Suggestions in Spotlight and Look Up" at the bottom of the window, THEN RE-CHECKED IT (ON). Now it works.

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.

Had same problem. Spotlight lit nothing. Changed Region in System Preferences from United States to United States (Computer). Now spotting everything.

I tried every suggestion. Worked on this problem for weeks. But only the command line solution worked. You have to turn on indexing for all disks. Sorry I can't find it now, but search for two sudo command line fixes.