Spotlight crashing on `1` and only `1`

crashsearchspotlight

I have a really weird spotlight problem and it is driving me insane.

When I open the spotlight search and type 1 the search box disappears as if it crashed. For example, if I intended to search for 1password, typing 1 will cause the box to disappear. However, if I type pass it works fine and finds the "1Password" app.

As far as I can tell this is the only character that triggers the crash.

I already tried the "disable indexing of bookmarks and history" fix and it doesn't help.

Is there some way to delete the spotlight index? Maybe that will help?

Any other clues I should look for?

I am on BigSur, but this also happened on Catalina, I was hoping the upgrade would fix it… but it did not. 🙁

Edit: adding the crash report

Process:               Spotlight [71310]
Path:                  /System/Library/CoreServices/Spotlight.app/Contents/MacOS/Spotlight
Identifier:            com.apple.Spotlight
Version:               1.0 (2150.7.5)
Build Info:            SpotlightUI-2150007005000000~3
Code Type:             X86-64 (Native)
Parent Process:        ??? [1]
Responsible:           Spotlight [71310]
User ID:               502

Date/Time:             2021-03-22 23:30:10.116 -0700
OS Version:            macOS 11.2.1 (20D74)
Report Version:        12
Bridge OS Version:     3.0 (14Y908)
Anonymous UUID:        xxxx

Sleep/Wake UUID:       xxxx

Time Awake Since Boot: 740000 seconds
Time Since Wake:       55000 seconds

System Integrity Protection: enabled

Crashed Thread:        5  Dispatch queue: com.apple.root.user-interactive-qos.overcommit

Exception Type:        EXC_CRASH (SIGABRT)
Exception Codes:       0x0000000000000000, 0x0000000000000000
Exception Note:        EXC_CORPSE_NOTIFY

Application Specific Information:
dyld3 mode
*** Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'NSInvalidArgumentException', reason: '-[__NSArrayM _fastCharacterContents]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0x600002bb9e90'
terminating with uncaught exception of type NSException
abort() called

Best Answer

If you don't get the crash on a fresh user account, you might want to force the system to rebuild the Spotlight index:

  • From the Apple menu, go to System Preferences
  • In System Preferences, select Spotlight, and chose the Privacy tab on the Spotlight screen
  • Click the "+" icon at the bottom of the screen and add a folder (any folder) to the list of folders excluded from spotlight
  • Once you've added the folder to the list of folders excluded from Spotlight, select that folder from the list
  • Click the "-" icon to remove the folder from the list of excluded folders.
  • From the System Preferences menu, select Quit.

The change to the excluded folders list should start the (long) process of rebuilding the Spotlight index. I can't promise that this will fix your problem, but it has a good shot at it.

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