Spotlight crashes after typing a few letters since Safari 12 update

@sparky67,

Thanks again.

I posted your work-a-round in my thread on this same issue:

Spotlight Crashes Often - Despite Rebuilding Search Index

It has been extremely annoying to not be able to use Spotlight!

Once I upgrade to Mohave, I may be able to include "Bookmarks & History" option in the Spotlight pane of System Preferences, once again.

Good work finding the offender. Your workround works great for me.

What kind of testing did they do for Safari 12. I would have thought that interacting with Spotlight would have been on the list as it is a specific checkbox on the Spotlight preferences.

Somehow I don't think I will be instantly updating to Mojave when it comes out. Give it a couple of updates maybe...

@dabricka - I did rebuild Spotlight index, the easy way through Preferences and the hard way deleting the indexes, to no avail. Unchecking Bookmarks & History works, thanks so much. Spotlight is to me a critical tool and why I stay on Mac OS...that goes and so does overpriced Apple hardware. 🙂

I've been noticing this same problem for quite some time. It's been pretty frustrating and disruptive to my work flow. I tried reindexing Spotlight, but that did not help.

I'm very happy to have found your post. Unchecking "Bookmarks & History" seems to have solved the issue for now. I do not consider Spotlight to be fixed, but at least I have a work around.

I can confirm that El Capitan, Sierra and Mojave are also affected

Thank you so much simply disabling this also fixed spotlight for me on Sierra. Will update if I can re-enable Bookmarks & History when I update to High-Sierra (or not).

Cheers!

YOU SIR, ARE A BLOODY LEGEND!!!!! Thank you so much!! I wish Id seen this before the clean install of Sierra and re-install of all software but I will take the fix anyway. I really can't thank you enough

This confirms the same problem I am having. I am on the latest version of Sierra. Spotlight disappears if I try and add a space early in a query. Anything less than six characters with a space makes it disappear. Sometimes it just vanishes as I start entering text. I'll be ****** if I waste my time reinstalling the entire operating system just to see if it resolves a problem that is Apple's job. In any case I never found spotlight all that useful or intuitive. I prefer the 'command f' way of searching from the Finder. Never quite figured out what was so special about Spotlight. Meaning it fails to replicate common sense for me in the way I look for things. It probably meets the needs of other more organised/ disciplined folk. But for the run of the mill user it is much over hyped.

I saw an update including Safari come through yesterday and hid the Safari update. I don't use Safari and its latter versions are impacting the everyday operation of the OS. So I will not be installing anything Safari, unless I have time to do the "recovery" process that I have discovered is the only was to return from the damage that the installs have and will create.

Thank you so much for this post! This has been driving me insane.

It's unfortunate that Sierra is not very old, and many corporate IT groups don't support anything newer; yet Apple has neglected this release.

I tryied to install the latest Combo update for Sierra, but my HD stays greyed, it says that it can't find a suitable HD to install it...

we are stuck in a buggy Sierra for ever (unless you do the titanic work of delete your HD and reinstall from a backup your 1TB... which it isn't extent of possible failures and it takes a long long time to complete, last time I did, downgrading from HS to Sierra again, I lost the modified dates of all folders, which cost me a lot lot lot of problems)

Wow, never had a problem fixed so easily. I rarely search Bookmarks anyway and always do it from the Bookmarks menu

Thanks

Thanks! This was driving me crazy, and all I had to do was follow this and I'm back to normal now! Appreciate it!