MacOS – Applications Don’t Show Up in Spotlight

macosspotlight

Spotlight has stopped showing any results for my Applications. I've tried reindexing and removing the index so it rebuilds it. No change. I've tried adding Applications to the Privacy tab and removing it, no change. I tried repairing disk permissions and redoing the above, no change. I've tried removing everything from the index except Applications and then I just get nothing for any search at all (except dictionary entries). I tried adding a symlink in my homedir to Applications and reindexing, but no change.

Any ideas on what to do? I'm running Snow Leopard. This is driving me crazy!

Update: I've noticed that when I start a reindex with sudo mdutil -E / and then immediately do a Spotlight search for an app that the app shows up temporarily until Spotlight gets disabled due to active indexing. After the indexing is done, the app entries go away.

Best Answer

Loading the metadata plist worked for me:

Turn off spotlight:

sudo mdutil -a -i off

Unload it:

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

Load It:

sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

Turn on spotlight again:

sudo mdutil -a -i on

Now everything is being reindexed as expected.

In newer versions of macOS, just turning indexing off then back on again resolves the issue.

Related Solutions

Why is Automator not working with Spotlight Search

What happens if you try in terminal.app (change /Search/Directory/ to yours):

mdfind -onlyin /Search/Directory/ kMDItemFSName == "\"NUCLEUS SOUNDLAB Pantheon III.rfl\""

Or in applescript editor.

    set searchPath to "/Search/Directory/"

    set this_item to "/Users/USERNAME/Desktop/NUCLEUS SOUNDLAB Pantheon III.rfl"

    set theFileName to "\\\"" & (do shell script "basename " & quoted form of (POSIX path of (this_item))) & "\\\"" as string

--set theFileName to quoted form of (do shell script "basename " & quoted form of (POSIX path of (this_item))) as string

  set theOrigFilePath to paragraphs of (do shell script "mdfind -onlyin " & searchPath & " kMDItemFSName == \"" & theFileName & "\"")

How to get Outlook email indexed by Spotlight after reinstalling Office 2011

Finally found the solution to this problem. Outlook provides a custom importer to Spotlight to index email. It is typically found in:

"/Applications/Microsoft Office 2011/Microsoft Outlook.app/Contents/Library/Spotlight/Microsoft Outlook.mdimporter",

You can use the command /usr/bin/mdimport -L to list all installed importers. When I did that I saw that the importer from the old installation of Outlook was still installed because it was still in the trash can. When I tried to manually import an email using the command usr/bin/mdimport -d2 /[path]/x00_138.olk14Message I saw that it was failing to load the importer from the trash.

Emptying the trash fixed the issue. Wish there was a way to selectively empty the trash without deleting everything.

Once I emptied the trash, I had to force Spotlight to reindex the email folder by adding the /Users/jim/Documents/Microsoft User Data folder to the Privacy tab of Spotlight System Settings, and then removing it again. After spotlight reported the indexing was complete (via the Spotlight dropdown in the upper right) the email was all indexed again.

Hope that helps!