Spotlight fails to find files & folders

Spotlight frequently fails to find files or folders that I have created on my user. Some files and folders will show up, but perversely never the ones I want. For example, I wanted to locate a folder I have entitled "Business Card", so I entered "Business" into spotlight. I got a couple of "business" hits on my documents, and a whole slew of system ones and mail messages, but I had to shuffle manually through my files until I found it. And this kind of thing is happening all the time, to the point where I have virtually written off Spotlight.
I have all the options in the preferences list checked, and have placed files and folders at the top of the list.
Any thoughts as to why this is happening?
Thanks.

Spotlight is notorious for its weaknesses and erratic behavior. You might try reindexing your Spotlight. Open up Spotlight in Sys Prefs, go to Privacy and drag the HD Folder there. Leave it a minute then remove it by clicking on the minus at the bottom. This will force Spotlight to reindex the drive, which may take some time.
I mostly use EasyFind (free) instead of Spotlight.
http://www.devon-technologies.com/products/freeware/

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Spotlight fails to find files with search items

I just did a Spotlight search on
Japanese English は
Spotlight found more than 3500 items, but the two sample Word files I looked at didn't have は in them.
This is really frustrating. Is there a way to ensure Spotlight only finds files with the input?

Spotlight is notorious for its weaknesses and erratic behavior. You might try reindexing your Spotlight. Open up Spotlight in Sys Prefs, go to Privacy and drag the HD Folder there. Leave it a minute then remove it by clicking on the minus at the bottom. This will force Spotlight to reindex the drive, which may take some time.
I mostly use EasyFind (free) instead of Spotlight.
http://www.devon-technologies.com/products/freeware/

Spotlight fails to find existing files

?- why should spotlight sometimes fail to find files that are already on drives attached to our fileserver?
Is there anything I can do to 'force' a rigorous search?

Spotlight is notorious for its weaknesses and erratic behavior. You might try reindexing your Spotlight. Open up Spotlight in Sys Prefs, go to Privacy and drag the HD Folder there. Leave it a minute then remove it by clicking on the minus at the bottom. This will force Spotlight to reindex the drive, which may take some time.
I mostly use EasyFind (free) instead of Spotlight.
http://www.devon-technologies.com/products/freeware/

Fails to find files that exist, fails to search everywhere

Running OSX 10.4.3 on a Powerbook G4 1.5gHz and on a PowerMac G4/867.
I hope it is because I am doing something wrong, but so far I am very unimpressed with Spotlight, for the following reasons:
•It fails to find files that are known to exist. For example, I have an application named MacTracker. It is in my Applications folder. When I enter
tracker
in the search field,
(with location set as wide as "computer" or as narrow as "Applications", with or without a "name contains" restriction) Spotlight will not show MacTracker as existing, even though I can see it with my own eyes, in the Applications folder window in the background. Only if I search on
Mactracker
will Spotlight see the application. This seems ridiculous to me. Any search, especially a "name contains" search, ought to show MacTracker if I search on track, tracker, actra, mactrac, etc. But, no. I have to enter "MacTracker" if I want it found.
•I make use of OSX Mail only occasionally. For most of my e-mail, I use a Unix mail handler known as PINE. PINE stores incoming and outgoing mail as plain text files in /users/me/mail . However, Spotlight refuses to include that location in its searches. I have tried using the Spotlight preferences to add
/mail to the list of specific places to search; no luck, Spotlight appears completely blind to anything outside of the locations Apple arbitrarily decided I needed to be able to search in.
Can anyone offer any ideas on how to make Spotlight work for me, instead of against me?
Thanks in advance.
Mac OS X (10.4.3)

same problem here. the only answer i can find is....spotlight buh-lows. does anyone know if we can just revert to ye olden way of searching? simple things like: searching actually find the stuff you're searching for. and: list of items found arrangeable by date/alphabetically (just like any normal window in osx). also, is hitting apple-f essentially just bringing up spotlight in its own window, or does this search function differ at all? sorry to hijack the thread, but we suffer from the same problems. thank you!
pb12 Mac OS X (10.4.2)

Why does spotlight find files & folders that i've deleted?

i have several external drives connected to my g4/os 10.3.9 housing my music collection
when i connect them to my intel mac mini/ os 10.4.10 and delete a file or folder it still shows up if i search for it in spotlight (or using the search in the top right of the finder window). it shows up with a blank icon, uses zero k, does not give any location, is "read only", and if you double-click it a message comes up saying that it is an alias and the original can no longer be found. it then gives me 3 options "delete", "fix alias" or "ok". none of these achieve anything.
any ideas? it is annoying as it makes searching for anything really annoying as half of the results are these meaningless "aliases". this problem only occurs with files & folders originally created on the drives by my g4/ 10.3.9
if i create and delete a file or folder on the drive from my mac mini it behaves as normal (ie: once deleted it isn't found by searching.
aaaagh!!! help!

is there a way to force tiger to build an index for this drive? there was in panther (under disk info...you could see whether it was indexed, and start indexing if it wasn't) - couldn't see it in tiger (only had a quick look)

Spotlight does not find files with "_" (underscores), but only for certain file types

Hey Folks,
this is strange, maybe someone has an idea.
I already searched the internet for a while, nothing found so far.
I have a file "calc_mean.m" on my desktop.
When I type "calc" in spotlight, it shows the file.
But when I type "calc_" it suddenly does not show the file anymore. Nor does find the file, when I enter "calc_mean.m" in spotlight.
When I enter "calc mean.m" in spotlight, it finds it (using space instead of the underscore).
Now comes the real surprise:
When I rename the file to "calc_mean.txt", spotlight suddenly DOES find the file when entering "calc_mean.txt".
I recreated this "feature" with other files, copying and renaming ".txt" files to ".m" files, and if there's a underscore in the file, spotlight wont find it.
Playing around a bit more, it seems spotlight does find files with underscore when they are documents, at least it works for the following extensions:
.pdf
.doc
.txt
.xls
But these extensions for example do not work:
.mp3
.m
.k
.a
.ka
(and other random endings I tried).
I am pretty confused. Sure it's no big deal learning to search for files that include underscores in their name using space instead. But I'm still quite puzzled. Any idea?

All of those have meaning in various database search syntax (not sure if it matters).
_ usually means any character.
% usually means any run of characters.
- is often used to negate what comes next, i.e. "don't include results that have the following text."
I don't see any problem on my Mac, though.
I also don't have any problem finding file names with those accented characters using Spotlight. I would suggest reindexing Spotlight, but if cmd-f finds them, I'm not sure that would help.
Spotlight: How to re-index folders or volumes

Spotlight can't find file (even after re-indexing)

I have a files right on my desktop that neither spotlight or finder can find in their search results. Don't know when this started happening, but very weird. I've re-indexed several different ways but still no luck. Anybody run into this?

Baltwo: Thanks for the try, but your answer had no bearing.
The PROBLEM (which I solved) was that the user (the name with the little house next to it), had had its priveleges changes from Read/Write to Write Only (Drop Box).
I have no idea how or why that happened, but the result was Spotlight couldn't find anything. Once I put the privelege back to Read/Write, everything works fine now and Spotlight is once again all seeing! The priveleges are those little Sharing and Permissions section at the bottom of the Info summary (Get Info).
I am back to using Spotlight again and I've made sure any changes to me (the user) are under my lock and key.

Spotlight can't find files on my camera's SD card.

If I do a search (via Spotlight, via the "pill" oval, or via cmd-F) on my 32gb SD card for "RW2" (Panasonic RAW file), I get nothing. If I do the same search on my HDD, I get lots of hits, as there are lots of RW2 files on my machine, but none of the results reside on the SD card. This tells me Leopard can see the files, just not on my SD card.
The card is FAT32 by neccessity. Is there something I'm doing wrong to not be able to acess the files via Spotlight? EasyFind finds them in 2 seconds.
Thanks.

I've had some luck with excluding a drive and then removing the exclusion. This triggers spotlight to reindex a drive, maybe a memory card too?

Spotlight won't find files in user folder

i have spoken to apple tech support on this and they continue to try to find a solution but.....
i have files that spotlight doesn't find. they are in my user folder. in fact, it won't find the folder (s) one is on my desktop, one in documents. (these are just the ones i've tested). when i take the folder and just put it on the hard drive (root level), spotlight finds it. also, apparently, it can be found when i put it in the user folder of another user. i would like to avoid reinstalling the system. any thoughts??

Start with http://www.pinkmutant.com/articles/Leopard/leospot.html and my mod to Finder's Find at http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=6725932 for what you can change so you can find stuff.

Using spotlight comments to find files

Hello
I am new to this forum so please be patience with me. I would like to use keywords in the spotlight comment area to find files on our shared network. However, I am having problems with this. I can find files by name, but not by contents or spotlight comments on our shared network. Can anyone help me with this problem.
Thanks Heather
Message was edited by: Heather316

To Apple Discussions!
Check out the Article: Using Spotlight to search for items
+"To organize your files so you can find them more easily, use the Spotlight Comments field in the Get Info dialog. For example, you could mark all the files for the same project with the project name, tag all your urgent files with the word "urgent," or enter a description that will help you find the file later.+
+If you want to limit your search to specific locations and attributes, open Finder and choose File > Find."+
There may be other info you can use from the Article.

Spotlight can't find file

I just saved a file in a subfolder in my documents, but Spotlight is not able to find it. It is a .png file (picture file). Spotlight does however find other files in that folder. I'm searching via filename, not content. If I open the folder, I can see and use the file without a problem. I have copy/pasted the file name to make sure it is not misspelled.
Any insight into why spotlight is proving useless here will be greatly appreciated. I'm loosing faith in OS X and I'm really sad about it.
Thanks

Dimitris, my own suggestion is very simple: forget Spotlight. Disable it using Spotless, which is available here: http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/33800
Then download either, or both Easyfind http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/8707 and Find File http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/10906315
I haven't used Spotlight for over a year now, and have even found a way to remove that pesky magnifying glass from my menubar.
I can find anything I want, any time I want, very fast and simply and above all - reliably.
<Edited by Moderator>

Spotlight fails to find folders

On a new iMac running 10.7.2 with two separate disks (SSD for Lion and apps and hard drive for user data) I have trouble to kick Spotlight into finding folders when searching by name. Spotlight indexed the hard drive twice but searches for folders by name for instance "lab" won't bring up any results, same for "lab folder" - only a search for "lab kind:folder" finally brings up the looked after folder. On a Macbook Air also running 10.7.2 I don't have this problem. What's wrong here? Is this a bug in Spotlight related to having user data on the secondary disk...?

Same here. I'd think that this is a bug. Did you file a bug report?

Spotlight can't find files

Hi,
I work in a production plant where we're cross-referencing thousands of catalogue numbers over a few drives. Spotlight has always seemed to work flawlessly, but we've recently installed the latest os update and suddenly, we have disappearing files. If you access the file through the finder, it's there, but spotlight (nor any of the system search tools) can find the file... and this is a blatant search like "1490" - when the file name is "MFA1490.pdf" for example.
Can someone tell me what the crap is going on here? It's got me spooked to say the least. As a side note, we have another machine running Panther and we were able to locate the file over the network using that machine.
I did a verify on the drive we were searching and it came up clean.
Noticed another forum where someone was making a similar complaint, but whoever the correspondant was, didn't really say anything other than "go out and buy file buddy" and marked the forum 'solved'.

Hey, Pluggernaut.
I'm not sure what precise Spotlight glitch you've happened upon, or how to fix it, but even if I knew and could tell you how to repair or work around it, it'd still leave you spooked! Spotlight is fascinating technology that makes many new things possible, but Apple made a big, big mistake by hanging all of the OS search functions off of SL and its index. The pre-Tiger Find command searched the hard drive directly (and all of it) for matches - you couldn't search content or many kinds of metadata, but you had confidence in the results at least. If Find didn't find it, it wasn't on your machine. Period. SL by contrast relies on the index for everything - meaning that if a file is in a place that SL doesn't index by design (and they don't tell you what locations), or has been designated private, you can't ask about it at all. Worse still, SL might for some reason fail to complete its index, or the index can become corrupt, and SL has no way of informing you of this. And again if it's not in the index then it's invisible to Spotlight. The upshot is that a negative search result in SL may mean either that no matching file exists - or SL has missed it for one of these many reasons. There is no way to tell which it is - you just have to guess. Or I suppose, simply take it on faith that the answer is complete. (Indeed I think you can't really defend Spotlight without some measure of Faith - faith that it is, in fact, always working correctly or perhaps faith that Apple, in its inscrutable wisdom, really does know what is best for us. But I digress.)
The bottom line is that if you need to be confident that your filename searches are comprehensive then you must abandon Spotlight for that and turn to a non-index based mechanism like Easyfind, or Panther's Find command (if you can bear the pain of reinstalling your OSes).
Of course the fix from Apple is obvious - let Spotlight handle the cool stuff and return the mundane, workaday search duties to a Find-type utility like Finder. (Or at least return it to the OS so people can use it when they have to be confident in the answer.) Meanwhile, good luck!

Spotlight does not find files on Time Capsule disk

I have the 2TB time capsule configured with a DATA and FIL disks. The DATA is used for the Time Machine backups. The FIL disk is used as a NAS (Network Access Storage) disk. The FIL disk works as advertised except Spotlight. When I mount the FIL as a shared disk and go into Spotlight and seach for a file by the filename, nothing happens. I spent hours on this. I seached Google and found nothing. I also tried mounting the disk as a SMB. This works partially when I alter the search criteria to seach only "Shared". But it only works within the folder. It does not search the entire tree. Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated. Thanks

By default, network drive is not indexed.
See here for the default list of folders that Spotlight will search:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301533
You can manually turn on spotlight on a specific volume by using Terminal and enter:
sudo mdutil -i on /Volumes/X
(where "X" is the name of the network volume.)
If the index is corrupted, and you want to rebuild it, enter:
sudo mdutil -E /Volumes/X

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.

Spotlight fails to find files & folders

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