Ghost contacts in spotlight

Solution 1:

Michal, Thanks for answering your own question; that really helped me.

Spotlight searches on my two Macs were littered with phantom duplicate contacts. I was hesitant to go this approach until I read of your success.

For future visitors, my steps were:

1. You may want to backup Contacts (File - Export - Contacts Archive)
2. Quit Contacts.app
3. Turn off all contact sync services (System Prefs: Internet Accts: iCloud/Google: Contacts)

4. Move contents of ~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/sources to Trash.

5. Re-enable iCloud, Google, etc Contact sync.

6. Check address book in Contacts.
7. Test Spotlight Search: success.

Solution 2:

Both answers didn't work for me. Spotlight would still show contacts, deleted long time ago.

However, making the following helped me to solve this issue:

1. Go to ~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/sources
2. There will be multiple folders. Check each one of them for the most recent contacts. You will recognize them, by looking into 'metadata' folder.
3. Delete those folders in the /sources/ directory, that you think are old. Leave the most recent contacts folder intact.
4. Spotlight search now displays the results correctly.