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You are here: Home / Not working? / Mac Spotlight Search Not Working? Fix

Mac Spotlight Search Not Working? Fix

Last updated on February 19, 2019 By Serhat Kurt 14 Comments

Spotlight Search on your Mac lets you find apps, contacts, documents and many other things. I use it all the time as it makes easy to find whatever I need. This short article explains how you can troubleshoot If you’re having problems using Spotlight.

Here is what you can do to get Mac Spotlight search working again.

If you are having issues with iOS Spotlight search, see this article.

Before doing anything, simply restart your Mac. Restarting may fix your problem.

This article offers two tips: One is to rebuild the Spotlight index. This can be done in two different ways (1) using System Preferences (2) using the Terminal app. And the other tip is to restart the SystemUIServer process.

System Preferences

1. Choose Apple Menu

Apple Menu

2. Click System Preferences

System Preferences

3. Click Spotlight

Spotlight

4. Click the Privacy section

Privacy

5. Click the + (add) button

spotlight build

6. And add content or folder that you think Spotlight is not finding. It my cases. I added Macintosh HD to the list.

7. A window will appear saying “Are you sure you want to prevent Spotlight from searching in “Macintosh HD”.  Click “Ok”.

Spotlight privacy add

8. Now, click the – Remove button to remove Macintosh from the list

This process will force Spotlight to re-index the contents of Macintosh HD.

Terminal 

Note that the whole rebuilding process can also be done via the Terminal app. Here is how:

  • Open the Terminal app (Applications/Utilities/)
  • Enter the following command
  • sudo mdutil -E /
  • This command will “Erase and rebuild index”
  • Press enter
  • You may have to enter your administrator password

If rebuilding does not work, read on: Kill SystemUIServer. The SystemUIServer is a background process. It controls several aspects of macOS. The following process will make the SystemUIServer restart and that may fix your problem. Here is how:

  • Launch “Activity Monitor” (Applications/Utilities/)
  • Find “SystemUIServer” (you can use the search box)Activity Monitor
  • Double click
  • And click Quit
  • Do not worry, macOS will restart the process again, automatically within seconds.
  • Check to see if Spotlight is working now.

If you are not happy about the Spotlight search results, go to Apple menu > System Preferences, click Spotlight, then click the Search Results tab. This is where you can change your Spotlight settings.

See also: How to speed up Mac

Filed Under: Not working? Tagged With: Mac, macOS, Spotlight Search

Comments

  1. Nilusha supun says

    January 10, 2021 at 2:21 am

    using – sudo mdutil -E /

    Reply
  2. Roxana says

    October 1, 2020 at 8:55 am

    The actual solution is to look for “Spotlight” in Activity Monitor and restart ALL related tasks.

    Reply
    • Lauren says

      October 6, 2020 at 4:25 pm

      +1 this worked, thanks!

      Reply
    • Robin says

      October 16, 2020 at 2:07 pm

      Thank you! I did this, then went in and added and removed my harddrive from the Spotlight Privacy list and it finally worked.

      Reply
    • catrincm says

      November 12, 2020 at 2:11 pm

      To find activity monitor without using spotlight: it’s usually in applications, under utilities

      Reply
  3. Sbark says

    August 20, 2020 at 2:13 am

    I always got crazy with Spotligth on different MacBook and with different MacOS X.
    I think the problem is in Spotligth itself and in the way throuwitch it builds index. That is the reason for its speed.
    Finally I found “Find Any File” that’s an app really well conceived.

    Reply
  4. Bill Belanger says

    July 18, 2020 at 4:25 pm

    Spotlight doesn’t find the scanned document. I rebuild the spotlight and it fits it. The next document I scan is not found until I rebuild the index again. So it’s not indexing on it’s own.

    Reply
  5. Jeremy Young says

    April 5, 2020 at 10:23 am

    I had a bad set of problems with Spotlight (plus Mail search) and tried every solution i could find on the web with no effect. In fact they made things worse as Spotlight results went from erratic to non-existent, so maybe something was stopping spotlight database being added to? Finally I looked at the output from Console and found strange messages which then lead me, via web search, to try rebuilding the LaunchServices database. This apparently provided a total cure. The command I used was:

    sudo /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -kill -seed -lint -r -f -v -dump -domain local -domain system -domain user -domain network

    Reply
    • Dawar says

      May 14, 2020 at 5:28 pm

      You’re awesome.

      Reply
    • Marco says

      June 17, 2020 at 5:03 pm

      It didn’t work for me… buaaahhhhhhhh I’m on macOS 10.14.6
      I’ve tested creating a Clean install and then import all the mail and it work. But in my main machine I can’t figure out why I can’t search in the Mail app.
      I’ve tried “everything” I found with no luck.

      Reply
    • Knut says

      September 30, 2020 at 12:57 pm

      Fantastic – I´ve almost given up, but this made my iMac start re-indexing and search functions- THANKS

      Reply
  6. Shadi says

    March 8, 2020 at 9:06 am

    I just restarted my MBPro2015 – Catalina, and it worked perfectly.
    happened many times -> same solution worked

    Reply
  7. Lisa says

    March 6, 2020 at 7:28 pm

    I’ve gone through the above steps. My Mac is Catalina 10.5.3. I cannot search for text and receive results at all. I believe Dino is correct. This is a bug in Spotlight.

    Reply
  8. Dino says

    December 11, 2019 at 5:56 am

    None of these worked unfortunately. I’m beginning to think there’s a bug in spotlight. I’ve rebuilt the Spotlight Index through System Preferences and through Terminal:

    nodename$ diskutil resetUserPermissions / `id -u`

    Plus all the steps mentioned here. This is the second brand new Mac I am having this issue on, the first I returned as defective. No apps are found in spotlight with all set to index no mater what I do. I’ve even spent hours on the phone with Apples incompetent support who’s having me reinstall the OS like the horribly trained people they are. This is pathetic.

    Reply

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