Spotlight is crashing when I type some words

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, does a 5 minute disk repair before it loads up, and 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.

leroydouglas wrote:

To trouble shoot further you can:

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

The problem disappears in Safeboot, so presumably it's a conflict with another program.

In another thread Cannot type in spotlight since upgrade to 10.12.1, for a very similar problem (not text typing occurring at all), this cause was suggested:

"The issue occurs when you have spotlight open, and as you type, another app takes focus on top of it (Little Snitch in my case). Very easy to replicate."

So, I'll try some tweaks with Little Snitch and see if that helps.

I have a similar problem, though the exact opposite to the example you give. If I type an "f" in Spotlight, it works and shows FaceTime search results. If I type "fa" it quits. Typically, if I type one letter it works, if I type the two or three I need to have a meaningful search it quits. It effectively stops Spotlight being a useful tool unless you only want the top result from a one letter search.