How is Spotlight search in macOS so horrible?

[mklein]

Perhaps it's just my experience, and perhaps it's because I simply upgrade each OS update and don't Nuke / Pave a fresh install, but Spotlight Search in macOS is completely useless. Recently placing everything into "Private" designation, and then releasing it to re-index the database -- achieved no improvement.

Just now my son asked about a future event in "Reminders," and searching within the app couldn't find the event. Manually digging through found it.

Finder searching is blank for 30 seconds or so, without showing the correct results in external drives. Command-Space has never shown me any item I was looking for, having to "show in finder" results to then sort by the best method.

Thankfully I pay for a NeoFinder subscription which always delivers the proper result. Always. Google can search the universe within seconds with excellent results.

Steve Jobs debuted Spotlight search with realtime results that were perfect. What happened?

 

[stevenkan]

Agreed. I almost never find what I'm looking for, except for manually looking through folders.

 

[jeanlain]

No problem here.

 

[ProMacUser]

Spotlight search is one of those things that seems to have been neglected in macOS in favor of the implementation in iOS. My guess is that the tighter integration of apps in iOS probably helps it work better there, because data is available more centrally. Just a guess, though.

 

[jaberg]

I use Spotlight for search and as an app launcher with no notable difficulties.

 

[jeanlain]

When I look up a word that I know may relate to many files, I use the Finder search field with a combination of "search tokens": file type (pdf, docx...) file name and/or content. I don't expect Spotlight to show me the most relevant result on top.
I mostly use cmd-escape as an app launcher.

 

[benwiggy]

I simply upgrade each OS update and don't Nuke / Pave a fresh install,

You should never have to do this. For starters, the OS is on an entirely separate volume from your data, so there's no need to erase the OS for an update -- you're already overwriting it.

Spotlight is one of the (many) things is macOS that when it works, it works beautifully, but when it goes wrong, there's very few mechanisms for fixing it. You can try deleting all the .Spotlight files and the plists in the user library; but that's about it. Also use the terminal command for reindexing, not the UI.

 

[almostinsane]

You know what is worse? Search in the iphone/pad mail app. Why can it never find a single message?

 

[japtor]

Feels like it's generally been fine for me on my Macs, particularly combined with searching in the Finder for better querying...on iOS is where it's all over the place for me. Hell a lot of the time I just want to launch a simple web search (often with a DDG search bang), and a good chunk of the time it just stalls out and shows nothing, not even just my query as typed.

 

[cateye]

On MacOS, by default Spotlight search includes a huge number of categories (System Settings > Spotlight > Search Results). I've personally found Spotlight's utility goes way up if I cull the majority of those, limiting its searches to just Applications, various file types, and folders.

Otherwise, the problem I run into is not one of results, of which there are many, but priority—Spotlight always seems to want to present external sources (websites, email messages, etc.) before on-disk resources, which is almost never what I'm using SL to search for in the first place.

 

[mklein]

I have the problem of using Adobe products that spit out unlimited peak files, backups, caches, render items -- and spotlight can't seem to discern which it the top level item that I was using recently, often, daily, etc.

NeoFinder delivers much more relevant results, perhaps because it is not accessing the library / system areas that are usually not a priority.

Suprised that search cannot be an area of excellence for Apple. Can't imagine that the macOS AI will do things better.

 

[gabemaroz]

My beef with Spotlight is how it puts the most irrelevant garbage at the top of a search. Specifically, suggestions.






I have never done a search for 'deseed tomatoes'. Ever. Not in a browser, on my computer, or anywhere else. I'm completely mystified why this is a suggestion. And I'm also stumped as to how I can turn this crap off.

Long ago you could reorder the results but Apple removed that functionality so I can't even bury it.

I’m going to wipe and rebuild the spotlight index using terminal in hopes that it fixes some of the problem.

 

[gabemaroz]

Rebuilding fixed the issue, YMMV.

sudo -i
mdutil -Ea
mdutil -ai off

mdutil -ai on

 

[SportivoA]

I've been using Alfred for my launcher and seldom search for a long while now. Maybe I just don't search files that often.

I've also been suing Onyx for things like cache rebuilds and cleaning. It has a lot of good features better summarized on the application page linked. Just remember not to run it before going to the Apple Store for system crash diagnostics...

 

[lloyddean]

Been using "Find Any File" but it still won't search my offline and 'unmounted' storage devices?!

 

[dal20402]

I've had no significant issues personally, but it's broken a few times for my wife, requiring a sudo mdutil -E / to fix. When it breaks, it just becomes impossible to find anything local.

 

[Giant Microbe]

Easyfind might be worth a look.

 

[mklein]

Easyfind is a helluva lot better than Finder once I switched the search to "All Volumes". Side by side comparison searching for a current project I've been working on for a month, sorted by Date Modified -- EasyFind is showing much better results than Finder / Spotlight. The top results for Finder are cache file updates of old, outdated content that may have been backed up recently but not truly modified.

 

[Carhole]

I've got a bigger gripe with Apple removing the containing folder option dialog from a Spotlight search hit, and have seen it become non-functional on two Macs with heavy Microsoft Office usage, though have no idea if there's a correlation there. What irks me far more is that Recents within in finder never indexes anywhere close to realtime, so yeah, I just did a whole bunch of shit TODAY, as in recently, and none of that shit shows up for a few more days or at the fastest, overnight. You'd think that default behavior in an all-SSD ecosystem could be coded to offer that functionality seeing as how, ya know, it's like a default favorite within Finder and Spotlight.

 

[JimCampbell]

I've got a bigger gripe with Apple removing the containing folder option dialog from a Spotlight search hit

That's still (sort) of working for me on 15.1… CMD-RTN on a Spotlight result will open the enclosing folder in Finder, and just holding down CMD with a result highlighted should show you the path, although it's usually truncated so it's pot luck whether the bits of the path displayed are enough for you to actually figure out where the file is saved.

(This is important, because the truncation usually clips off the top levels of the path, and I need to know whether the file is the original, or the CCC back-up, which I most definitely do not want to be modifying. If there's a way to exclude the back-up drive from Spotlight indexing, it's not in the Spotlight section of settings.)

What's particularly enraging for me is the way practically any file with a visual component now gets broken out in the 'Photos from apps' section, wherein the CMD-to-show-path thing doesn't work. These are files. They live on my hard drive. Treat them like every other bloody file and let me find them the same way!

 

[Carhole]

That's still (sort) of working for me on 15.1… CMD-RTN on a Spotlight result will open the enclosing folder in Finder, and just holding down CMD with a result highlighted should show you the path

Thank you!

 

[JimCampbell]

If there's a way to exclude the back-up drive from Spotlight indexing, it's not in the Spotlight section of settings.

Oh… I've found it. It's hiding behind the somewhat unhelpfully named "Search Privacy" button in Spotlight settings. That's one annoyance taken care of, at least.