Indexing/searching doesn’t work anywhere

I am having problems, mostly on my Mac Air 2022. Whenever I search Spotlight, Finder, Mail, iMessage, Notes, or even Siri, it turns up either no results, or does not turn up what I am looking for.

Example, I have a pdf on my computer called research.pdf, which I knew for a fact I named as such. I was searching both Finder and Spotlight for "research.pdf". Finder turned up nothing, Spotlight turned up anything but. Then when I scroll down far enough in my downloads folder, I eventually found the file manually. (I then marked it with the orange tag, and after that all other orange tag files lost the orange tag... but one problem at a time.)

I have checked my Spotlight Privacy settings and nothing is prevented from being indexed. I can’t think of any setting I changed to have disabled an efficient and/or correct searching function across all these apps but it is becoming increasingly frustrating and an obstacle to my work.