Spotlight doesn't find search results in .HTML file contents

When I use Spotlight to search, it doesn't find any .HTML file contents. If I rename an .HTML file to use a .TXT extension, the contents are found. Is there a way to enable Spotlight to find contents in .HTML files?

I remembered that used to be problem, so I just checked on my local version of my site, and Spotlight found the files on the basis of content without a problem. So I took a look at my installed mdimporters in /Library/Spotlight, to see what may have led to this happy turn of events. I thought perhaps the iWeb mdimporter might be doing it, but was unable to find a reference to HTML in its type declarations. I then took a look at in /System/Library/Spotlight and discovered that RichText.mdimporter has a declaration for public.html as a content type. You should have that mdimporter installed by default, but you might take a look to make sure it is there.
If the mdimporter is there, but the html files aren't being indexed, it could be that whatever program you are using to create them isn't giving them the appropriate content type. I code by hand using TextEdit, which saves them with the following metadata entry:
kMDItemContentType = "public.html"
kMDItemContentTypeTree = (
"public.html",
"public.text",
"public.data",
"public.item",
"public.content"
They are then evidently indexed without problem by the RichText.mdimporter. You might try opening one of your html docs in TextEdit (as plain text), resave, and see if Spotlight then picks up the content of the file. Of course, the content means the words that people see when they look at the page in a browser. If the content you are talking about is stuff that is inside an html tag, you are out of luck. I know of NO way to get Spotlight to find that. EasyFind will though, but it is a brute force search and will take awhile, even when restricted to a particular folder.
Francine
Francine
Schwieder

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Spotlight doesn't find html files

I'm a web developer. I have thousands of ".html" files, such as "india.html"
Spotlight won't find them.
It does find "india.cfm" files so I'll assume the problem is the html extension.
If I Show All in Finder it does them ... in a Find window section called "Developer" ... which doesn't appear in Spotlight, or is a choice in Spotlight Preferences.
This used to work. I'm now using 10.9.5. I don't know at which update it stopped working ... I don't perform this often but when I do it's critical.
I've repaired permissions and reindexed the drive (twice, by adding and removing the drive from Spotlight index preferences).
Thanks.

A test...
Made a plain text file, saved to desktop, apple.html. Spotlight doesn't find it. Duplicated it. Change the name to apple.txt. Spotlight immediately finds it.
Spotlight is having a problem with html.
Checked the Spotlight RichText.mdimporter and it has:
<array>
<dict>
<key>CFBundleTypeRole</key>
<string>MDImporter</string>
<key>LSItemContentTypes</key>
<array>
<string>public.rtf</string>
<string>public.html</string>
<string>public.xml</string>
<string>public.plain-text</string>
<string>com.apple.traditional-mac-plain-text</string>
<string>com.apple.rtfd</string>
<string>com.apple.webarchive</string>
<string>org.oasis-open.opendocument.text</string>
<string>org.openxmlformats.wordprocessingml.document</string>
</array>
</dict>
</array>
... so that's in there...

Under Yosemite Spotlight doesn´t find my files

Under Yosemite Spotlight doesn´t find my files on the computer and connected hard drives. What can I do?

Try re-indexing Spotlight.
Spotlight – Re-index
See if you can find the file using this program
EasyFind – Spotlight Replacement

Show hidden files in finder search results

I discovered my backup HD was rapidly full because of After Effects Cache folder hughe size.
I fixed it in CCC to not to backup that directory but I need to remove all the old ones.
I am able to see them under Users/Library....... (hidden by default). I also have deleted some 50Gb AE cache folders.
But I have a lot of folders.
I've tried to search all of them 'Adobe After Effects Disk Cache' but finder search does not display them. I also tried Terminal 'locate' on /Volume/HDbackup, no results
Thanks

Hi Viking, thanks for your help.
The purpose to get them in Finder search result is to select them all and send them to trash at once.
To test your commands I changed
'~' by /Volumes/....../_CCC\ Archives and '.*' by 'Adobe After Effects Disk Cache'
I got lots of 'permission denied'
I also tried
find -x ~ -name 'Adobe After Effects Disk Cache' \( -type d -exec find {} \; -prune -o -print \) 2>&1 > hidden.txt
where it is supposed to find one result but hidden.txt was empty
'Adobe After Effects Disk Cache' is a directory
What do you suggest?
Thank you

MetroLyrics search not working. Gets stuck at finding search results....

Metrolyrics search is not working for me in my FF. Search always at 'finding search results' but nothing more.
Tried IE 10 and there metrolyrics working fine, so it is something with FF.
Please help...
Thanks in advance.

EDIT: solved by removing NoScript.....
Sorry for posting....

Spotlight doesn't find files after Time Machine re-load

So I just got a new macbook pro and transferred everything from my old laptop onto it using Time Machine, which worked amazingly ... only weird thing now is when i search in the Finder Search bar or in Spotlight, it doesn't find any files that were on my old computer. I can find them manually, for example, I can be looking at a file called "house-info.rtf" in my Documents folder, but if i search "house" or even "house-info" it comes up with 0 results.
Any new file (I've made or downloaded on my new machine) comes up fine in the search, it's just files from my previous computer moved over via time machine...
any ideas?

Hi, and welcome to the forums.
Time Machine does not save Spotlight's index, so your drive has to be re-indexed. It may be that it just hasn't "caught up" yet. Give it some time.
If you're pretty sure it just hasn't done it, you can usually get Spotlight to re-index by excluding your internal HD from Spotlight (System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy) for a few moments, then removing the exclusion. That should make it start over.

Odd Finder search results

Working w/ Mav (10.9.1) I ran into a curious Finder problem: after performing a file search in a Finder window (search box top right) I got a list of files with no icons in front of the file names and none of the items shown is clickable (see screenshot).
Performing the same search with Spotlight (cmd-F) in the menubar top right OR in a MS Word OpenFile dialog window yields similar results w/ file icons and suitable items clickable as expected. Any clues? -H-

Select
View ▹ Show View Options
from the menu bar. In the dialog that opens, select
Arrange by: None

Spotlight doesn't find all files.

Hi guys,
i just installed Snow leopard on my old iMac that was running tiger before. With tiger i never had troubles like this and the same files im looking for now were always found. However spotlight doesn't seem to find them now. They are located in HD/library/.... anything in there cant be found and i didnt enable privacy for it.
After i moved one application out of there and dragged it on the desktop it was instantly found. Doesn't seem like a big deal since i know where the app is and i have it in the dock anyways, the problem just is that i am looking for other files that im not sure anymore if they are on the computer and if spotlight just doesnt find them it would take me a lot of time searching for them manually.
My question is, besides if you have a solution to fix this, if its due to snow leopard. Does it not look in the library anymore?
Thanks in advance folks,
P.S. i already re-indexed.

Spotlight does not search system folders by default. See,
Get Spotlight to search system files (and more)
Enter the search term in the Finder window's search field.
Click the [+] button in the search bar to add a search option.
In the first drop down menu choose Other.
Choose “System Files” from the list that pops up (and check the box to place in drop down menu to avoid this step later,) click on the OK button.
Now back in the Finder choose Include from the second drop down menu.

T/X model SORTing Find/Search results from Most Current Entry

Have the Palm T/X model, and use the FIND/search function constantly.
The results always come up from the earliest (oldest) entry to the most current.
This is a major league pain-in-the-butt especially when there are tons of entries to go thru to get to the most current date.
Is there any way to sort the FIND results so that they show from most Recent entry to the oldest.
This would be a HUGE Help.
Thx!
Post relates to: Palm TX

There is a pulsing, reddish dot in the middle of the
blue light but on the hard drive itself, I don't see
any "lights" in any "menu bar".
It's at blue circle with a white Q-shaped symbol at the right end of your menu bar.
If you dare to use the terminal application (can be found in the utilities folder) you can use the following command to re-index that drive. Start Terminal and type (or paste) the following line and hit enter:
sudo mdutil -E "/Volumes/xxx/"
Replace "xxx" with the name of Your drive! If there is a space in that name type it like "/Volumes/My\ Drive/"! You will be prompted for Your admin password to proceed.

Finder Search Results DATE CREATED / 10.5=MOST USELESS O.S. OF ALL TIME?

Please Please Please tell me there's still a way to turn on the view options in finder search windows/results to display a files "Date Created" / "Date Modified" / "Size" etc. (basically all the options we have in a finder list view window).
Seriously, if we are limited to Name/Kind/Last Opened with no way to see, at the very least, Date Created/Modified in the search results Mac OS 10.5 has just become useless to meet my needs. I mean totally and entirely useless. I mean sell my iMac and buy a windows box so I can find my files useless.
Just tell me there's a way to turn on ALL the view options.
<Edited by Moderator: Please See Terms of Use>

There does not seem to be any way to restore Finder's behavior and options for search as it was in Tiger etc. Leopard's Finder view options aren't even allowed any longer in search windows (go to View->Options to get a frustrating message about it).
There seems to be NO 3rd party utility to allow real-time file search and display/sort results by size -- obviously noone wrote it, since Finder used to be able to do that - until Leopard, that is.
If this is a bug it's a pretty big and obvious one. I've reported it on bugreporter.apple.com (I guess others have done the same).
If it were to be considered a "feature" in Leopard, it'd be one of the most limiting ones in 10.5 - this one and the Dock's Stacks are pretty high on the list of useless "new features" in Leopard. John Siracusa wrote in his excellent review about these and others (at http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.ars/12) :
"+Not only does the Leopard Finder take no bold steps towards a brave new world of file management, it even further distances itself from a coherent incarnation of established file management paradigms. The changes in Leopard do indicate that Apple has taken a renewed interest in improving the Finder, but motion is not the same thing as progress. For where I'm sitting, it looks like one step forward, two steps back.+"
Speaking as someone who's been developing software on Mac OS X since pre-Aqua Mac OS X Server 1.0 days, I sadly have to agree...

Changing View Options for a Finder SEARCH Results

I want to add SIZE to the Finder window that is generated from a <command> Find.
I cannot add anything to the standard Name/Kind/Last Opened. I want to add SIZE to the search results window. When I choose View Options, the options window says:
There are no view options for the Searching This Mac window.

corbey wrote:
I want to add SIZE to the search results window.
In normal Finder windows you can select View>view options>*Calculate all sizes*
In Finder search window results, this has been hobbled. Here is the work around:
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2009083113534843
Message was edited by: leroydouglas

Incomplete Finder search results in Mavericks

Hi guys. It appears search results in Finder in Mavericks are incomplete.
I am used to delete preference files left behind after I trash an app -like .plist files located in home folder/library/preferences -they are showed no more in search results. Obviously finder search criteria are customized to show system and hidden files.
It looks like a bug. Can you reproduce same issue?

Back up all data.
In Contacts, select
File ▹ Export ▹ Contacts Archive
from the menu bar, and save the archive to your Desktop.
If you use iCloud, disable contact synchronization in the iCloud preference pane. When prompted, click Delete From Mac. Re-enable synchronization. Wait for the contacts to re-synchronize, then test.
If you don't use iCloud, or if the contacts fail to synchronize, delete all contacts, then select
File ▹ Import…
and import the archive you created. It may take a few seconds for the contacts to be indexed. Test.
If you don't like the results of this procedure, quit the application. In the Finder, select
Go ▹ Go to Folder
from the menu bar, copy the text on the line below into the box that opens, and press return:
~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook
Restore the folder that opens from the backup you made before you started.

Add 'Size' field to Find search results

Is there a way to add a size field to the window when using the Finder's Find command. When doing this in Tiger the search results had this and other info, but in Leopard there is only Name, Kind and Last Opened.
Thanks,
Chris

Yeah, this is just one more of the little things that make me regret upgrading to Leopard. Nothing but little take-aways by Apple that effect the normal day-to-day kinds of user interactions; horrible search functionality, mind boggling step backwards in the usefulness of ical, horrible printer support, loss of single click and hold dock folders....

Finder search results show MP3s with incomplete or changed filenames in Yosemite

Under Yosemite, when performing a search for "mp3" in Finder, certain search results will not display their true filename under the "Name" column:
For example, the "Name" column above should display the entire filename (as shown in the Status Bar), not just what I can only assume is the track title.
This does not apply to all mp3s, only to some. Probably something to do with ID3 tags, or perhaps with certain hyphen usage in the filename.
Anyway, I'd just like the "Name" column to show me the filename as it should, and not metadata. I can't find how to change the results to display the correct filenames.
This causes several problems. First it makes sorting by an album's track number, which is frequently included in the actual filename, in the search results impossible, as now the numbers are not part of the list. Therefore if I want to drag an album into an iTunes Playlist in the correct album order I have to go to the source folder and can't do it straight from the search window. Also I can't see separate versions of the same song, which may have the same track title but different filenames. Also I can't see the filename at a glance, which may include other important information other than the track title. And so on.
I can't find anyone else who has this problem on Yosemite. Mavericks yes... and sadly no help. Hoping it's fixable.

I have the same problem with AIFF's too...
It's a big problem for me as I'm currently doing some sound design.
I need to see the file name in the finder, not the title/track name.

Spotlight doesn't find "numbers," in Numbers. Way to fix that?

Hi.
With Excel documents, Spotlight finds numbers within the document. i.e. an invoice number, an amount, etc.
However, Spotlight is not finding any numbers inside my Numbers documents.
Is there anyway to change or fix this? THanks for the help. Even if there is a third party way or something? Thanks!

i can imagine why spotlight does no indexing on data inside cells... it looks to me pretty useless to index files that have hundreds of reoccurring numbers numbers and numbers - would you like to have an overview of all files that has the number 6 in it, or 51.... and than to think of it that a lot of numbers in a table are not numbers at all, but only calculations
however, there is a way to get spotlight informed:
use the inspector, document (most left tab) there is a option to set various spotlight hints like author, title, keywords and comments
hope that will help
wished that Numbers and others were more scriptable, so i could get some cell contents and paste it into the keyword field there

Spotlight doesn't find search results in .HTML file contents

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