Tahoe: Spotlight Doesn't Index and Search Files

"CoreSpotlight" is a folder inside of the "Metadata" folder, which is itself inside of the "Library" folder in your home directory. To access the "CoreSpotlight" folder, click "Go to Folder" from Finder's "Go" menu, type or paste "~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight/" (without the quotes) in the dialog, and press return.

You should be taken to a listing of the contents of the CoreSpotlight folder. Here, you can select all ("Edit" > "Select All" or ⌘A), then move to Trash ("File" > "Move to Trash" or ⌘␡), then empty Trash. These files will be regenerated on restart, but if you want to be extra cautious, you can move the entire CoreSpotlight folder to the desktop before restarting.

When I did the first search in Mail after emptying the CoreSpotlight folder, I saw an "Indexing" message in the bottom left of the main window. This also showed up in the Activity window ("Window" > "Activity"). This eventually went away and search worked normally. Hope it works for you!

Lovegasoline1 wrote:

I already did that weeks ago (add/remove HD from privacy and rebuild index).

It had no effect on Spotlight whatsoever.

It can't hurt to do it again but I'm not expecting a resolution.

A SafeBoot may clear certain system cache files and rebuild the spotlight in the process.

Start up your Mac in safe mode - Apple Support then reboot as normal and compare your results

no resolve—

You can try from the Finde>Go>Go to Folder copy and paste:

~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight/

delete all the files within this folder. Reboot and compare your results

Booting in Safe Mode and then rebooting in normal mode worked for me briefly, but the problem returned.

What seems to have worked permanently (so far) is leroydouglas' suggestion of deleting all the files in

~/Library/Metadata/CoreSpotlight/

See if this process (plus an hour of re-computation) does the trick:

Rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac - Apple Support