Spotlight 2 letter limit

Question

Spotlight 2 letter limit

Spotlight only seems to work with 2 letters for me. (mostly, but with some exceptions it will work with 3)

If I type one letter, it works although the list seems rather limited

If I type two letters, it works although the list seems rather limited

If I type three or more letters it just stays where it was after I typed the second.

If I type 3 letters quickly before it has time to complete a search after entering just one or two letters, it does nothing at all

Search in the Finder works just fine.

Apple TV (4th generation), tvOS 9.1

Posted on Mar 17, 2016 7:59 AM

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Answer 1

Ferd II

Level 10

104,871 points

Mar 17, 2016 11:41 AM in response to Winston Churchill

Winston,

I suppose you have tried: Spotlight: How to re-index folders or volumes - Apple Support?

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Answer 2

Mar 17, 2016 11:41 AM in response to Ferd II

I hadn't. I have multiple volumes. It seems to be a spotlight as a whole issue rather than a particular volume, but I'll index them one by one and see what happens. Could be quite a wait.

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Answer 3

Ferd II

Level 10

104,871 points

Mar 17, 2016 11:56 AM in response to Winston Churchill

Winston Churchill wrote:

I hadn't. I have multiple volumes. It seems to be a spotlight as a whole issue rather than a particular volume, but I'll index them one by one and see what happens. Could be quite a wait.

...yes, quite a wait. Even one volume seems to take too long. Depending upon the content of the volumes, I would consider excluding instead of including them.

Cheers.

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Answer 4

Mar 17, 2016 12:07 PM in response to Ferd II

It's currently indexing my system drive, I took the decision to exclude all others now and add them back one by one. Even though I'm only about 20% through the system drive index, it seems to be functioning correctly, if not slowly (perhaps to be expected during indexing). Perhaps it was the indexing of just one of the other drives that was causing a problem.

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