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.)

I also tried reindexing Spotlight and other suggestions. I booted the system in safe mode and found that file search worked. This led me to believe the problem was with third-party programs or extensions that load at system startup.

I went to Settings - General - Login Items and Extensions. I eventually discovered that the problem was with two extensions from HP and Logitech. I deleted them (look at the folders LaunchAgents, launchDaemons), and then search started to work again.

Also, check the "Unsupported Applications" (I don't remember the exact name) folder on your HD. When updating, the system places unsupported applications in this folder, but extensions and background objects may remain. If anything is there, it's a good idea to delete everything related to that application.

jpdemers wrote:

I tracked it down to a specific login item: "Logitech Inc."

No clue what it does, or how old it is, but I turned it off, restarted, and Spotlight now works just fine. Logi options+ doesn't load properly, but I almost never use it; I figure I can turn "Logitech Inc." back on if I ever need it.

_Tom_G:

Amazing. Thanks a lot. Turning it off fixed the spotlight issue for me.

Btw. I just disabled "Logitech Inc." in the system settings and the Logi Options+ app still loads and seems to work.

Just to clarify for anyone that encounters this problem, the page in System Settings called "Login Items & Extensions" lists many different types of things. To give you just a little taste of how confusing it is, I can tell you that of those many different types of things, only two are actually "login items".

Apple is also in the process of changing this terminology yet again to talk more about "background activity" that encompasses one type of login item, as well as launch daemons and launch agents.

A newer category is the "Extensions" part. As you guess if you've following along so far, "extensions" means several, radically different types of software that are all called "extensions".

My expectation is that problems with Spotlight would be most directly caused by misbehaving Spotlight extensions. But I'm not saying that people are wrong to disable a "Logitech Inc." login item. If that's what fixes it, then that fixes it. This particular area of software is deep within the Real of Mystery where nobody really knows how it works. And, as I discovered recently, that "nobody" also includes Apple engineers themselves.

For that reason, I urge caution in this particular page of System Settings. This is where you can easily fix things, and just as easily break things. Two people have mentioned software from "Logitech Inc.", but for someone else, it could be some other brand of software. So if you want to hack around here, take notes! Write down what you change, and what the result was. When you find a culprit, you may want to restore other software back to their original settings, or not.

I tracked it down to a specific login item: "Logitech Inc."

No clue what it does, or how old it is, but I turned it off, restarted, and Spotlight now works just fine. Logi options+ doesn't load properly, but I almost never use it; I figure I can turn "Logitech Inc." back on if I ever need it.

As your suggestion sounds very logical, I checked my own start-up items on the settings. (System settings>general>startup items and extentions) There was one calculator app on the "open at login" list and a bunch of old items down below on the "allow in the background". I erased removed the item on the login and made some cleaning on the background list. Restarted. Bammm! All files started to show instantly. No new indexing etc. Because it was already there and something was blocking it. Thanks for the suggestion!

(since I removed all at once, I am not sure which was the guilty app)

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

Amazing. Thanks a lot. Turning it off fixed the spotlight issue for me.

Btw. I just disabled "Logitech Inc." in the system settings and the Logi Options+ app still loads and seems to work.

Thanks. I have - now had - a Logitech Smart Radio (long since defunct) and when I removed the app Spotlight started working again.

Hardly intuitive!

I also ran into this problem and at first thought it might have been a Tahoe bug. But after trying on a different Mac, it worked on a MBP 2024 but failed on a MBP 2023, I looked more carefully at third party software: both machines had been upgrades-from-upgrades going back to PowerPC era macs.

In the end, it seemed to be Adobe Photoshop Elements 2023 and/or Adobe Premiere Elements 2023, neither of which I ever used regularly, but kept in case I want to edit some very old videos.

Does anyone know of a tool that attempts to help locate old software not compatible with the current MacOS release? Doing a clean install of all apps would require manually saving and restoring preferences.

Quitting Spotlight and reopening it fixed it for me too.

nowinnie wrote:

This led me to believe the problem was with third-party programs or extensions that load at system startup.

I've been trying to tell people to do this for two years.

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.