MacBook Pro :: Spotlight / Search Isn't Working
Jun 25, 2009
My MBP 17 (2.6 GHz, model 4.1) with  128 SSD isn't finding files which are definitely on my drive. Seem to only find files on the desktop, but not in sub folders for some reason. Any ideas why? Is it the SSD thats not indexing properly? How can I reset or fix this. Its becoming annoying
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Apr 5, 2012
I have tried everything to fix Spotlight search with no luck. I have deleted the index file in the root directory with out success. and tried several other ways of tring to re index my machine. As you can see from my screen shots. There is a file called Apps on the desktop. Yest when I search the desktop it cant find it.
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Jun 25, 2014
Since the latest upgrade of 10.9.3 my and other office computers have problems with searches using spotlight and Finder search on internal, external and networked volumes. This is a big roadblock to our office workflow. Reindexing doesn't fix the issue and we can see clearly that the files we are searching for are there.
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Apr 3, 2012
I am having a problem where my mail App is not searching the entire body of the message any more. I installed Lion soon after it was released, and I believe that it has been working up until recently.Â
If I do a search, it won't search the message body, and gives me no option to search for "Message contains" (just "People" and "Subjects"). If search for subject "foo" and then click on the "Subject" pull down menu, it shows "Subject" and "Entire Message", but "Entire Message" is greyed out.Â
I've done a lot of web searching and most people with similar problems had problems with Spotlight. If I do a Spotlight search, it does find all of the mail messages correctly. Its just the Mail app that won't let me search.Â
I haven't tried re-indexing spotlight yet because spotlight seems to be working okay. Note that all of my mail accounts are "POP" accounts with the mail stored locally on my machine.Â
Info:
Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.3)
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Jun 21, 2012
New mac user here. Running latest Lion (10.7.4) on a Macbook pro. I have Paragon NTFS installed, and reading/writing to NTFS volumes has worked fine. However, I am having an issue with spotlight on my external hard drive (500 gb, NTFS formatted). It simply does not work. Searching my internal main hd works fine.Â
I have tried several suggested solutions to this problem already. This includes adding and removing the hard drive from the privacy tab of spotlight. I also tried several terminal commands that I found online such as "sudo mdutil -E" and "sudo mdutil -i on". These all indicate that indexing on my external drive is in fact on. Spotlight does not seem to be indexing the drive. HOWEVER it does return results for folders that I have opened. Seems kind of strange. Doesn't help me much, as I am not about to open 1000's of folders and files just so they can be found through spotlight.Â
Info:
MacBook
Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.4)
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May 12, 2009
I'm searching for a file in Finder. When I select "Preferences", which is the directory I'm in, it finds the file but when I select "This Mac" it doesn't.
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Jun 24, 2010
I am pretty new with Mac and I am trying out my new macbook pro. I'm trying to get to know it. And a while ago I was trying the Spotlight feature. I have a file under User/Library/Preferences/ that is called [URL] I just thought I'd try to search for it on Spotlight if it can find it. I typed myname123 on spotlight but no results were found. Why? Are there any specific strings that should be entered if the search string is between a filename?
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Feb 11, 2009
Recently the application icons in Spotlight's search window look odd. There's no problem with the search itself, Spotlight hasn't slowed down, the indexing seems ok, in fact the whole system appears to be ok, let aside these odd looking icons.
Logging out or restarting the system works for a while, 3 Spotlight searches to be precisely, the icons are fine for a while, but the fourth search returns every application icon the way it is seen on the screenshots I made.
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Jul 13, 2009
Is there a way to search Google in Spotlight search? I am running 10.5.7 if it helps.
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Jul 25, 2009
Is there a way to bring up a 'form' to do a search*, so I can type in, for example, start and/ or end dates for the files I am interested in, or types of files, or a word in a file, or a part of the folder 'tree' its beneath, etc?? I know I can do this in spotlight but then I have to know, remember or lookup all the syntax and get it correct, much too much hassle for infrequent searches.
I'm presuming someone must have come up with a simple app that front ends a potentially complex spotlight query with a form? Or is there even a native facility to do this in OSX?
* Like you can in WinXP for example, not that I'm trolling, its just that it was sooo much easier in XP and I'm hoping I'm missing something obvious :-(
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Oct 14, 2009
I have a list if 600 servers, and folder full of escalation documentation. What I'm looking for is the easiest way to feed spotlight that list and return a list of documents that contain at least one of those servers. We're moving a datacenter and I want to start figuring out what docs need to be updated.
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May 8, 2010
I noticed that after I use spotlight to launch an app - say Pages for example, Pages launches but Spotlight continues to search for all files with "pages" in the background - slowing down the system. Is there a setting somewhere that will make Spotlight stop searching / clear the search after launching the result?
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Mar 14, 2009
I'm running Leopard 10.5.6 on a PowerBook G4. I installed Leopard about five days ago, from Tiger. (Possibly relevant: I was evaluating Together when I discovered this problem. Together is an information manager which uses Spotlight for its own indexing.) I don't know if this problem existed before installing Together, since I had only 3-4 days of use and I don't think I tried a Contents search before. (I really don't think it's Together, but it's _something_.)
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Jun 8, 2012
How to best use the Spotlight and or Command+F find/search feature unsion Lion 10.7? Specifically, I am looking to filter the search to "Name Contains". I know if I Com+F, I can apply that filter with a couple more clicks. And Spotlight can initiate the search. The problem with this method is Show All in Finder leaves no way to apply the Name Contains filter unless I go back and edit the results, then I can drop down and select the filter.
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Jun 13, 2012
Searching for anything in Spotlight returns no results. Trying to re-initiate indexing by setting the hard-drive to "private" and then "non-private" is not allowed. Using mdutil to force recreate an index fails. "No Index."Â
Info:
MacBook Pro (15-inch Mid 2010), Mac OS X (10.7.3)
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Jun 30, 2014
I have a number of Mac's (all running Mavericks), connecting to a shared folder on a Mac we use as a 'server' (it doesn't run server software though, just Snow Leopard client).Â
Does Mavericks Mac's use the 'spotlight index' of this shared, networked, Snow Leopard Mac, or when we search it, it's just searching the actual file structure?Â
I'm having issues with searching this networked Mac (some files not being found and then a on later search they appear), and I don't know whether a rebuilding of the spotlight index on the networked Mac is a relevant troubleshooting step.Â
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Nov 6, 2009
I am running on Mail 3.6 on OS X 10.5.8. When I archive a mailbox, it is saved as a text file that opens in TextEdit. I have all of my archived mailboxes in one folder. However, if I try to search for a word in that folder using Spotlight, nothing comes up. It seems that Spotlight does not recognize these files. How can I do a search of archived mailboxes?
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Apr 29, 2009
Why does Spotlight not search your system directories/files when performing a search? Does it only search within the current user's directories? Is there anyway you can make it do a more thorough search?
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Jun 7, 2009
I did a Spotlight search for one of my songs that I have written and have files in both Logic - song itself I recorded and a document in Pages of the lyrics. But some of the other 48 items that came up were very strange...including this HTML document to a script that I have no clue of where it came from. I have never done a search for this and don't know how it got asscociated with my song. Anyone else have any weird things show up when doing a spotlight search? PS Upon reading the script I just realized it is from Hitchcock's Rear Window, one of my all time favorite Hitch movies, but I never viewed this or saved it onto my hard drive.
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Jul 29, 2009
Almost every single day, Spotlight crashes and restarts. Why is this? How can this be fixed? I already tried a Re-index and that did not work.
System Information:
Mac OS X Leopard (10.5.7)
EDIT: Since 10.5.8 was released, I am running 10.5.8.
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Jul 24, 2010
Spotlight Crashes when Search Something (SystemUIServer Crashes Actually). Yesterday, I installed 10.6.4 from Updater. After everything is OK, I realized that problem. When I tried to seach something from Spotlight, I got the list without icons and after 2-3 seconds, menu closed and SystemUIServer restarts. Those are the reports from Console.
First I tried with Guest Account - Same Problem
I created new acount-First Search, No Problem, Others have Same Problem (Thats User Account)
I created 3rd and 4th account-Same Problem (Those are Admin Account)
There aren't any file named "com.apple.spotlight.plist" in my account. I deleted "com.apple.systemuiserver.plist" and restarted computer. Same Problem. What I realized after, There aren't any file named "com.apple.spotlight.plist" in all accounts, even they are admin or normal account. (Guest,2nd,3rd,4th and My Account). There are systemuiserver files in all accounts. Its looks like I have problem with system wide. I verified and repaired Disk. with System DVD. I verified and fix Permissions. with System DVD and Onyx Application. I installed 10.6.4 again and restarted again. No file named com.apple.spotlight.plist.
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Aug 23, 2010
I have not seen anyone address the following problem. Nevertheless, it absolutely annoys me, and I wonder if anyone knows how to fix it. Sometimes, when I press the normal COMMAND+SHIFT key sequence to use Spotlight, the Spotlight search field will drop down lower on the screen. It will still be on the correct side, but it will drop down near the middle of the screen. In other words, the Spotlight search field will not be attached to the menu bar in the upper-right corner (next to the clock and the day of the week) where it normally appears. However, during those instances, it will pop back into place if I do one of two things: 1) start typing into the Spotlight field anyway or 2) Change my resolution to 1680x1050. This really annoys me when it happens. Does anyone know how to fix this so that it never happens again? It doesn't happen a lot, but I don't want it to happen again, and I absolutely love using Spotlight. I'm a Spotlight addict. Also, if there's a fix, can someone tell me anything I can do to Snow Leopard, so that the Spotlight search field never pops out of place again?
Sorry, but I'm very much a perfectionist.
Here's a screen shot of how it looks when it happens. I snapped it off the desktop when it happened last time:[URL]
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May 17, 2012
I have an external drive with a lot of music on it. I recently upgraded to Lion and now the spotlight will not search the disc.
There used to me a spotlight box in the corner of the drive window and now there isn't. The disc is half a tare and it's next to impossible to search manually. It is a Go Flex drive.
Info:
iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.8), 20" screen 2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
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Jun 10, 2012
How do I know WHERE the files are located when I search via Spotlight? I search but do not always wish to click file or application to open .. I just want to know its location. Snow Leopard showed me the path so where is that information in Lion's spotlight?
Info:
iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.1)
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Mar 8, 2008
Here is a screenshot of the typical spotlight window on a 10.5.2 machine (Intel Mac Pro). Here is a screenshot of the same window after I click the '+' sign to add an additional search criteria value. In the second screenshot, that extra blank space at the bottom is where is supposed to say Name: or Kind: etc., but its just not there and I have no idea why? I have tried creating a new user account on my machine to see if the same issue occurred their as well, and sure enough, it does not.
I have tried all sorts of maintenance and repair tactics to resolve the issue (such as repairing permissions, running Disk Warrior, Cocktail, Onyx, Leopard Cache Cleaner, etc.) but nothing seems to resolve the issue? In case any does know of any third-party apps that might cause this issue, below are a few screenshots showing some of the apps, system preferences, and processes running on my machine:
Applications Folder:
http://img116.imageshack.us/img116/8...sfolderuj1.png
System Preferences:
http://img155.imageshack.us/img155/9493/sysprefsiq9.png
My Processes:
http://img155.imageshack.us/img155/1...ocesseseq3.png
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Jun 7, 2009
I delete all of my Sent, Deleted emails when I quit mail. I did a search within Spotlight with my one friends that I email a lot, put his name in, and up popped 162 emails that I had sent to him since March 2008. How can these emails be deleted so they don't show up in Spotlight? Should I uncheck the boxes that say Store, messages on the server? Regardless, this would not cause the emails to show up/not show up within Spotlight on my Mac, would it?
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Aug 25, 2008
I have folders of Adobe ActionScript (.as) files, but I've noticed that spotlight/search ignore the contents of these files, even though they are text-based. How do I configure spotlight/search to examine the text within these files?
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Mar 23, 2012
Every time I do a spotlight search, intending only to get filenames (that's what it says in greyed out lettering in the search field), the Spotlight results show content as well with the result I have sometimes 1000s of items listed when I just want results containing filenames only. The search results are useless?How do I get Spotlight to search for filenames only? This is how Search used to be in Classic and for a while in OSX.Â
Info:
MacMini 2.26GHz, Mac OS X (10.7)
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May 2, 2012
In Lion, the spotlight no longer shows the path of a search. Can I restore that?
Info:
iMac, Mac OS X (10.7.3)
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May 14, 2012
How do I eliminate certain filetypes from results in a Spotlight search?
Info:
MacBook Pro (17-inch 2.4 GHz), Mac OS X (10.7.4)
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