Spotlight not finding documents on Mac despite indexing

This appears to be a bug in macOS Tahoe. It persists even after rebuilding the Spotlight index. To fix the issue, what worked for me was to launch Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor and force quit the Spotlight and spotlightknowledged processes (they will reinitiate themselves). After that, Spotlight searches worked properly, and continue working after rebooting, etc.

(If you prefer and know how, you can also use Terminal to kill Spotlight and related processes.)

Courtesy of Barney-15E:

Copy/Paste this into Terminal. sudo will ask for your password. Just type the password and hit return. It won't show anything on screen.

sudo mdutil -X /; sudo mdutil -i on /; sudo mdutil -E /

Then, restart or log out and log back into your account.

Follow-up to my prior post, since I can't edit it:

At least in my case, I had been clicking on the "Files" option, thinking that this would limit the search to files. Don't do that. Backspace until the search field is empty, then enter your search query.

I discovered this after trying everything else, including trying to re-index while in Safe Mode. I don't think it actually did re-index, but the attempt might have tweaked something. (And sometimes just booting into Safe Mode provides the magic tweak.) In any event, the problem has gone away for me. I'm posting this in case it helps somebody else.

Lanshap wrote:

Thank-you for your suggestion. All of my switches are the same as yours. Still no luck.

I would say the best you can do at this point is Shut down and restart.

>Shut Down...

unless you want to try the rebuild all over.... the best way I found:

ref: Rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac - Apple Support

submit your Apple Feedback here: Product Feedback - Apple

Quitting Spotlight and reopening it fixed it for me too.

Still no results with the files. It just shows the apps but no file is listed.

I have tried all below but no luck:

-Log in to safe mode and go back to normal login

-Add Machintosh HD to spotlight settings and remove it later to start re-indexing

-Type the console codes to turn off spotlight, re-index, turn on

-Kill all spotlight apps in the activity monitor.

All above methods above did not work for me.

2021 M1 MBP, Tahoe 26.0.01.

It just stopped working after updating to Thaoe 26. The mini fix to 26.0.1 did not solve either.

Same here. Apple M1Pro

14inch, 2021

32GB

Tahoe 26.0.1

I rebuilt the index several times. Restarted all spotlight processes etc.

Status:

• Applications, Suggestions, Recents, etc. working
• Even the files mentioned in the suggestions cannot be found with the regular spotlight search
• Search works in finder

Any help, idea etc. would be appreciated.

Force-quitting Spotlight and spotlightknowledged processes did not work for me, nor did rebuilding the index. All switches are where they were under OS Sequoia. External drive (also re-indexed) is also invisible to Spotlight.

Relatively few people are encountering this problem, which suggests that there's a conflict with some other application or a particular System configuration.

Lanshap wrote:

Thank-you but this unfortunately did not fix my problem

I would verify some options did not get flipped off—

[Edited by Moderator]

Thanks, @neuroanatomist! I didn't think of trying to restart the processes, but it worked perfectly.

Thanks!

Works for me - thank you!!

Unfortunately didn't work for me either. Hopefully the next update will address it.