Spotlight not indexing Applications on High Sierra

calicoradio.com wrote:

I have the same issue has this poster: Spotlight not indexing Applications on High Sierra

That is a good idea to trouble shoot further you can:

Try a SafeBoot https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201262

Takes noticeable longer to get to the login screen as certain system caches, dynamic loader cache etc get cleared and

rebuilt. This test will tell you if third party interference; extensions etc are not loaded in safe boot mode.

Test issue in another user (or guest user) account https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204443

This will tell you if it a universal issue or isolated to your user/admin account.

SpotLight including Apps is nice to have—some apps are hard to get to—for example Network Utility.app

If leroy's suggestion doesn't help, try creating a new user and see if it works for the new user. You can also try it while booted in Safe Mode.

Verify in Spotlight Preferences you have not excluded them

>System Preferences>spotlight

Both: √Checked in search results

and not in the Privacy list

If it is checked toggle it off and back on again in an effort to jump start

This was for the OP as an alternative.

Typing in preview should return Preview application as the top hit, but it also brings back a bunch of other hits for the word preview in other selected Spotlight categories. That can be distracting. My post above says show me an application whose filename explicitly has preview in its name.

As I mentioned, I never use Spotlight to find an application, as the most frequently used are in my Dock, or quickly accessible from Launchpad.

VikingOSX wrote:

This was for the OP as an alternative.

VikingOSX—I appreciated the post at face value.

Always learning and, another useful spotlight search methodology.

Yes it was for the OP, period. 😉

The options you've tried pretty much cover it. Why do you say Spotlight isn't indexing your apps?

I am using High Sierra 10.13.6 (17G65) here and although I do not use Spotlight to locate and/or launch applications, the following certainly works:

FWIW, so does typing in plain old "preview" in most cases. Apparently not for this user or the user he linked to.

I understood your post. I assumed if it won't list any apps, an alternative method wasn't going to work. I could be wrong. 😎