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Since updating to Sierra (10.12.3), searching for documents in Finder that contain words fails to find any of these items. Used to be able to find anything in the document. Now, my search capability is useless.
MacBook Pro, macOS Sierra (10.12.3), NA
This has just started happening to me too! Very frustrating ... for decades Finder has been my go-to to search the contents of files ... and I could do it a week ago but now I can't! Even using the criteria bars discussed in other responses. Windows Explorer used to only search on filenames, but now searches on contents (I use it at work), so would why would Apple muck with this long-standing function?
This has just started happening to me too! Very frustrating ... for decades Finder has been my go-to to search the contents of files ... and I could do it a week ago but now I can't! Even using the criteria bars discussed in other responses. Windows Explorer used to only search on filenames, but now searches on contents (I use it at work), so would why would Apple muck with this long-standing function?
Hi - a couple of things that may help. If you are searching from a Finder window, go to the Finder-Preferences and click on the Advanced tab. At the bottom, make sure the "When performing a search:" field says Search this Mac as opposed to just the current folder.
You also may want to check some of the troubleshooting in this article: macOS Sierra: If searching your Mac doesn’t return expected results
Hope that helps.
Assumption: You have System Preferences : Spotlight : Search Results boxes checked for (minimally):
and that your boot drive is properly Spotlight indexing.
If you search for Spotlight in the Finder Help menu, you will get these results. Especially pay attention to the Narrow your searches in Spotlight menu entry.
dot.com wrote:
Are you talking about Spotlight searches? They don't search internal contents of a file - only the meta information like name, date, etc. The database requirements for what you're talking about would be huge, so impractical.
That is completely false. Spotlight indexes and searches the contents of everything, as you can see here:
If you are having problems with Spotlight finding things, try re-indexing your hard drive:
How to rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac - Apple Support
There are also a couple of links on that page to troubleshoot.
Location of documents. Some places are considered "System Locations" and Spotlight doesn't search them (but it does index them). You can search those places with a Finder search adding "system files are included" in the criteria.
Send Apple feedback. They won't answer, but at least will know there is a problem or a suggestion for change. If enough people send feedback, it may get the problem/suggested change solved sooner.
In Spotlight, the following will find the specified types of documents, though it isn't peeking inside for any search terms. I have all of my Spotlight Results categories checked.
Basically, you look for the file identifier that best describes the document in the kMDItemContentType string returned by mdls.
Are you talking about Spotlight searches? They don't search internal contents of a file - only the meta information like name, date, etc. The database requirements for what you're talking about would be huge, so impractical. If you did have some sort of utility to search contents of files, it would be very slow for large numbers of files.
Can you give an example of what you mean by searching?
Good luck...
Barney-15E wrote:
That is completely false. Spotlight indexes and searches the contents of everything, as you can see here:
Including as it turns out, the word "celery" in a rough draft of a murder mystery novella someone sent me 7 years ago. I thought it was a false positive at first. lol
I guess it depends on how you define "search" and "everything".
According to what I've read Spotlight can only search content of files that have predefined plugins that define the contents of a "kind" of file. So if you want to search for something that does not have a "plugin" then you're out of luck. Many kinds of files have these plugins, like your Pages example, and some don't.
So claiming Spotlight can search the contents of all files is not accurate or true.
For a very simple example try adding your username (barney-15e) to an XML plist file (a simple ASCII text file) - Spotlight won't find it no matter how many times you rebuild the index. If you still want to claim that it can search everything then I guess that you can call that a fact if you wish - an "alternative fact" is more like it. If you want to say it can search the content of "some" files, then that is a real fact. But don't advertise it with an ability it doesn't have or will ever have - the overhead would simply be too large.
FWIW, the subject at hand was "Documents". Preference files are not considered "Documents".
Nor are image files, music files, video files etc. Spotlight cannot search for "Content" inside those either.
While in a Finder window, press "command + F", choose Kind > Document. click the "+" symbol, choose "Contents" contains <the word> you are searching on.
You can read this article : macOS Sierra: All My Files
If you want to search inside document files: use Easyfind.
Search in finder fails to find items in my documents
