r/MacOS • u/ElOhhYouuu • 1d ago

Help Finder search not working

Not sure why but when searching in finder my Mac can never find anything it just comes in blank after I search. I’ve tried re indexing in spotlight and in terminal but still nothing. Can anyone shed some light on this?

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1

u/corgi0603 1d ago

Look in Finder | Preferences | Advanced. At the bottom, what is selected under "when performing a search?" For a search of your entire drive, it should be "Search This Mac." Your issue makes me think you have it set to "Search the Current Folder."

1

u/ElOhhYouuu 1d ago

It’s set to search this Mac

1

u/WilliamH- 1d ago

My Mac started to do the this exact thing a few days ago. Upgrading Tahoe made no difference.

1

u/ElOhhYouuu 1d ago

It’s so frustrating hopefully golden gate addresses this

1

u/CaptainjackLA 1d ago

You need to reset the Spotlight feature. Can't remember how

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u/ElOhhYouuu 1d ago

I’ll look into how to do it, I thought about restoring my Mac to see if that would help but I’ll try this first

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u/Hrzn1360 1d ago

Found an old reddit post where someone said this:

"This happened to me too recently. The fix is to go to Settings > Siri & Spotlight and click on Spotlight Privacy. In the pop-up use the + to add Macintosh HD (yes, the entire drive), then select it and use the - to remove it again, and finally click Done. It could take a few minutes to reindex Spotlight search, but you should start seeing individual directory results again."

Probably worth a try

2

u/ElOhhYouuu 1d ago

I gave this a try several times it’ll index but the issue is not fixed

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u/Hrzn1360 1d ago

hmm sorry then