Search not working-Sequoia 15.1 Update

I rebuilt the index and that fixed it.

Credit goes to miner2008 - I don't know how or why it works - but it sure does.

There are several things you can try:

1) System Settings > Spotlight: make sure Events & Reminders is checked

2) System Settings > General > Login Items & Extensions > "Open at login" panel

de-activate items and extensions that could interfere with the indexation such as a VPN and CleanMyMac.

It doesn't mean you can't use them but at least you can activate them only when you need them.

Same thing with System Settings > General > Login Items & Extensions > "Allow in background" panel

3) System Settings > Internet Accounts

Within Calendars, switch off all your internet accounts (for iCloud and all the others you have)

4) restart your computer, revert to step 3) and switch back on the Calendars you want. This should do it.

I found this solution - it restored my mail search instantly. I had tried the things listed here, even chatted with Apple support - no joy. So here's the answer:

miner2008

User level:

Level 1

34 points

Posted on Oct 8, 2019 5:17 PM

This solved my problem. My search was broken too. I followed the stop/start spotlight as mentioned in the post above and the search is gradually coming back to normal. I think Spotlight needed a kick to get moving.

Summarizing from the link:

1) Launch the Terminal.app (Just copy/paste the string starting with sudo.... and press return)

2) Stop Spotlight and remove the indexing: # sudo mdutil -i off -E / <return>

3) Enable it again by typing: # sudo mdutil -i on / <return>

KenMacirish:

Wow, thank you. This worked (for now). And it was easy. Thanks again.

1) Launch the Terminal.app (Just copy/paste the string starting with sudo.... and press return)

2) Stop Spotlight and remove the indexing: # sudo mdutil -i off -E / <return>

3) Enable it again by typing: # sudo mdutil -i on / <return>

There was just an update to Sequoia yesterday to 15.2 and it is supposed to take care of these Spotlight search issues. My issues transcended the solution posted here and for the past 10 days, I've been working with a senior Apple tech who had to go to engineering to fix the problem. They told me this system update should do the trick. I hope it works, so if you haven't already you should probably run the update and see if it fixes things.

Here's an interesting update to my "rant" of yesterday:

After hours and hours of indexing--which I thought was only being regenerated on one disk since I only erased the Spotlight DB on it--I came in this morning and ran an mdutil status, and ALL volumes now have "indexing enabled". This is unexpected, because only that one drive provided this status yesterday.

I'm happy, but I don't know if I trust it. But I will try to keep a log on significant storage operations over the next couple weeks, and perform status checks to see if I can catch indexing going "off-line".

@AlWeir Most of the common non-intrusive fixes were tried as I mentioned. But the reason for my first comment was that 15.2 did not "fix" the issue, and it might be because any changes in 15.2 would keep corruption from occurring from then on, but would not proactively fix any existing corruption. My proof is that my corruption remained.

I also don't know what brought all volumes into "indexing" status from "read-only". I'm surprised that ALL volumes (except the boot drive and network share) got into that state. I'm also surprised that deleting the DB on one volume and inducing indexing there affected all volumes, but we'll see if it stays.

And even though all volumes are indexing now (and are done actively indexing), I still have stale aliases in one bellwether (or canary) folder that did not get removed. Do you know of any shortcuts to get rid of them en masse?

To recap, none of the solutions permanently fixed my instance of the problem, except for the combination of erasing the metadata (variations on mdutil -E) AND a reboot. Only doing the former did not fix all drives and the problem came back, but rebooting fixed Spotlight on all 10 volumes. One of the most important facts is that Spotlight rebuilds start whenever a drive is mounted (which means you need to either unmount it or reboot), so I recommend the reboot path occasionally.

Also, @Shasha_UA's suggestion is not a Finder menu item, but rather the second suggestion from @AlWeir's link. I looked in the menus because there was no context and that seemed the logical place to look. First.

Contact - Official Apple Support (CA)

I found mine in Macintosh HD›private›var›db›Spotlight-V100