Finder search links to wrong files, rebuilding Spotlight index doesn't help

I'm on Sequoia, and I've started getting completely unuasble results from Finder search. I do a search and I get what seem to be, based on the file names, the results I'm looking for. But those results link to totally different files.


For example, let's say I search for my home address. The results include a file called Mortgage.pdf, which is documentation from my mortgage. Sounds good. but when I try to open the file, it instead opens a picture of my cats called cats.jpg. If I look at the results more carefully, the path I see is something like /MyDrive/Images/Kitties/Mortgage.pdf. That's not where Mortgage.pdf is located. If, in the search results, I tell it to show the file Mortgage.pdf in its enclosing folder, it opens the folder /MyDrive/Images/Kitties and highlights the file cats.jpg (the same one that opens when I double-click Mortgage.pdf in the search results). So where is the file Mortgage.pdf actually located? Hopefully I remember where I put it, because search won't tell me.


In addition to that, I also get results with just a question mark as a name, and I get file names that don't show a path. If I double-click on one of the ones that don't show a path, I get a message saying that the original of the alias can't be found.


I've tried rebuilding the index multiple times, but I get the same bad results after the index gets rebuilt. I've tried running Disk Utility's First Aid on the disk, but it hasn't found any problems.


Any other suggestions? At this point, search is totally broken, and I'm at a loss for how to fix it.



MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 15.6

Posted on Aug 30, 2025 12:12 PM

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7 replies

Aug 30, 2025 05:52 PM in response to klausness

Did you try to rebuild Spotlight through the Terminal application? Here are the commands that helped me in the past to rebuild it:


sudo mdutil -Eai off 
sudo mdutil -Eai on 
mdutil -as


Note that the rebuilding takes some time. You should be able to see the rebuilding process (a progress bar) when invoking Spotlight.

Sep 1, 2025 01:08 PM in response to klausness

Based on a suggestion I got elsewhere, I tried restarting in safe mode and deleting the spotlight index there. That seems to have fixed it. The indexes actually didn't rebuild after deletion while I was in safe mode, but they rebuilt after I restarted in normal mode, and now search is finally working as expected again.


My guess is that it has to do with caches, because deleting the indexes in safe mode shouldn't be any different from deleting them in normal mode. But a restart in safe mode also deletes caches (though Apple isn't clear about exactly what caches are deleted), and I suspect that's what fixed it.

Sep 1, 2025 04:12 PM in response to klausness

My guess is that it has to do with caches, because deleting the indexes in safe mode shouldn't be any different from deleting them in normal mode. But a restart in safe mode also deletes caches (though Apple isn't clear about exactly what caches are deleted), and I suspect that's what fixed it.

All of the GUI and the -E option only vacuum the database. It seems neither work consistently any more.

Using the -X option will erase the folder and you will have to restart to get it to start indexing again.

The inability to delete the folder outside of Safe Mode could have been some cache problem.

Finder search links to wrong files, rebuilding Spotlight index doesn't help

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