Spotlight not finding apps ...?

For well over a week I’m finding that Spotlight can’t find applications. It might not be limited to applications, but that’s definitely the major problem.

I’ve tried the stuff for rebuilding the Spotlight index, and it’s just not working.

Does anybody else have this problem? If so, did you find a fix?

Given that the problem is likely with indexing, is there an alternative to Spotlight that doesn’t use the Spotlight index?

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I had the same issue a while back, still on Sonoma, where it would either not find apps or be slow to find them. I turned off web searches in Spotlight preferences (in an attempt to make things quicker and as I do not need those), did a reboot (my uptime was over a hundred days at that point), and also upgraded to Sequoia (which I held off for a while), which perhaps rebuilt the indexes. For now, the issue seems to have resolved itself.

Raycast’s beta file/application search uses its own index. It’s a bit faster, too.

People keep complaining about this from time to time. I would uncheck all the Spotlight categories under System Settings, then select Applications only, and rebuild Spotlight again. Then IMO, if it still doesn’t work it’s probably an Apple problem.

Either way I would select all categories again after trying.

I

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I’ve made it a practice to rebuild the Spotlight index as a follow-on action after each update to macOS. Just a habit I got into long ago when OS updates seemed to cause side effects regularly.

Katie

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I had this about a fortnight back randomly. Spent a bit of time trying different things and then came across this article. The article itself didn’t work but the comment at the bottom sorted it and started it rebuilding.

Not sure if it’s the same issue but hopefully helps.

Edit - grammar

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I’m wondering if it was overloaded. I stripped down the indexing to a few important catergories, and it’s working just fine.

I have a couple of folders with a couple hundred thousand files each - maybe it was getting stuck or something?

Anyway, it seems to work after the config changes and a rebuild. Thanks!

Maybe. AFAIK just about all file systems have problems with a large number of files in a single directory. Several years ago our graphics team was always complaining about how slow our server was when they needed a file. We tried HFS+, NTFS, ReiserFS, and ext4. Nothing really helped until we moved all the images into a database, which solved our problem

Thanks for asking this. I’ve been having the same problem since MacOS 15. Rebuilding the index worked for a little bit—but I’ve also resorted to using Launchpad (thankfully my keyboard has a button for that) when Spotlight started playing up again. We’ll see if this fix lasts longer.

For those who don’t know this is how you rebuild your Spotlight database (I normally drag in the Applications folder.)

I don’t mean a single folder - Im talking about nested folders that total that many. :slight_smile:

I’m not an expert but we were seeing unacceptable performance when a folder contained a small fraction of the maximum number of files a folder was able to contain.

For example, the theoretical limit of HFS+ (and NTFS) is more than 4 billion files per folder. I don’t remember how many total files we had at the time but I would guess it was in the low 10s of thousands. YMMV

I had that same problem after updating the MacOS, but the mentioned steps with reindexing and rebooting fixed it for me.