Spotlight does not work in High Sierra

Open System Preferences : Spotlight : Privacy. Drag your Macintosh HD boot drive icon from the Desktop onto this Spotlight privacy window. Wait 10 seconds, and then drag it back out of the privacy window. This will trigger Spotlight to reindex your boot drive.

I fixed this issue for sure in 10.13.2 macOS High Sierra:

Open Terminal

Show hidden files in finder with defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles YES

Hold the 'Option/alt' key, then right click on the Finder icon in the dock and click Relaunch

Navigate in finder to the root volume (Macintosh HD)

Delete .metadata_never_index

Delete immediately in Trash

In Terminal: sudo mdutil -i on /

Launch Disk Utility, and run First Aid against your boot drive. Launch Activity Monitor. Look for process names: mds, mdworker. As long as these are running, and multiples are normal, your drive is being re-indexed. A 2TB drive will not finish indexing in 5 minutes unless there are drive errors.

Also, open your Console app and look at the bottom-most log entries to see if there are fatal errors with mds, or mdworker processes.

Sparkleberry's suggestion is valid too.

I've done all the suggestions listed here and still no Spotlight, which also means my Outlook mailbox is not indexed so it only finds emails during search that were downloaded before I updated to High Sierra (although I can run the Microsoft Search Repair utility each day to index the emails of that day).

Sandy

I hope everyone will call Apple, work up the support chain to Senior Advisor and have them report to Engineering.

I have the exact same problem, have tried all things above, and Engineering is telling the Senior Advisor that this is NOT common and is "just me."

By now you've had a chance to install the new, presumably debugged High Sierra OS. I did that, then set Spotlight to index my entire HD. Which it did, in about 13 hours. It's a wonder to see all the worker routines busily arranging the new Index. And now, everything works! My Mac and especially important to me, my Mail and Contacts are indexed, also. I'm a happy camper again.

I still have the same issue. The spotlight privacy and back solution does not work as it comes with "the item could not be added or removed as of unknown error". It´s a disaster, I can´t work properly since weeks. Have to use my iphone gor searching my mailbox. Any other solutions except via Terminal??

I have some bad news for you... There is NO solution. Cturner's idea does not work, or works only for an hour or so.

Call Apple, get them to send in more details to Engineering - e.g. SSDs are affected too; searches restricted ot filenames are affected, etc.

So, if you've done the dragging your disk into that spotlight privacy tab and back out and it hasn't worked, you likely only have to do one step of the Terminal bit, which is NOT frightening or risky.

Just launch Terminal (one way is Finder > Go > Utilities, and click on Terminal)

Then paste in this:
sudo mdutil -i on /

It will ask you for your password, when you type it in you won't see the cursor moving, just hit enter when you are done. This will then turn the indexing on for the drive.

For me "System Preferences : Spotlight : Privacy" trick did not work. This is what worked:

In Terminal type:

sudo mdutil -i off /

sudo mdutil -E /

sudo mdutil -i on /

Thanks to Eric from Apple Tech Support for this solution.

Hi All,

I tried all the steps here and nothing worked. I ended up running a script in terminal which worked. Turned out indexing was turned off for some reason:

https://www.cultofmac.com/154458/re-index-spotlight-from-the-terminal-re-gain-va luable-time-for-life-os-x-tips/

Enjoy!

Hi Mrcturner.

DONE Show hidden files in finder with defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles YES

DONE Hold the 'Option/alt' key, then right click on the Finder icon in the dock and click Relaunch

DONE Navigate in finder to the root volume (Macintosh HD)

CANNOT FIND THE FILE Delete .metadata_never_index

Delete immediately in Trash

In Terminal: sudo mdutil -i on /

So, should I just do this command:

In Terminal: sudo mdutil -i on /

Many thanks.

I have tried all of the above without success. When in terminal, the system will not accept my password starting with the first command, saying that the user "is not in the sudoers file".

Thanks in advance for your help.

I wanted to follow up on my post above: I realized that the issue was that my account did not have administrator privileges. I changed that, restarted and applied the fix in Terminal described above successfully. Spotlight works as expected again.

Thanks to all for the tips.

From my point of view, why does Spotlight when you type in indexing no longer show it as it used to with an assessment of the time that it will take and then the blue bar wavering until it is done? At present it takes 3 minutes and then there is a funny little red symbol saying indexing which is not convincing. Why is indexing so hard to do and see? It is a valid process, but is always long winded process to set up in terms of opening system preferences>Spotlight>Privacy, + hard drive> - hard drive, and then opening Spotlight from the top menu bar and typing "indexing" into it. Why all the mucking about to instigate a process that we are recommended to apply once per month? And now it seems to be hidden. I personally do not want to open up Activity Monitor to see something that was easier to see in the past. Why do Apple keep removing useful features?