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Finder never finds anything

While trying to organizer my files, I did a search in Finder to find a duplicate. It found neither the duplicate nor the file in front of my eyes.


I read some earlier posts with similar problems, but nothing suggested resolves this.

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 10.14

Posted on Apr 13, 2021 6:50 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Apr 13, 2021 7:15 AM

Set Finder Preferences > Advanced >


and give this a read, Narrow your search results on Mac, from the macOS User Guide. This presumes that you have setup Spotlight to index your hard drive with specific search result categories. More info on Spotlight.

9 replies

Apr 13, 2021 9:05 AM in response to DDDS

There is nothing in my Spotlight Privacy panel either, and what I was suggesting is that you temporarily drag your Macintosh HD drive icon into this panel, and then abruptly remove it. That triggers fresh Spotlight indexing. Of course, if you have not selected relevant Spotlight Search Results categories, they won't be indexed, and the Finder, which depends on Spotlight indexes, will not find what you seek. Just setting Finder Preferences to search for everything does not mean that Finder itself is doing the searching…

Finder never finds anything

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