Applications Don't Show Up in Spotlight

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.

Solution 1:

Update Oct 1, 2021

In 10.12 (macOS Sierra) and newer, it appears to be enough to disable and reenable indexing:

sudo mdutil -a -i off
sudo mdutil -a -i on

Original 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.

Solution 2:

Had this issue and nothing worked until I rebuilt the index using this in the Terminal:

sudo mdutil -E -i on /

As an alternative you can also use a free app called Alfred which has a lot more features.

(I'm not affiliated with Alfred in anyway)

Hope this helps!

Solution 3:

When I tried Anil's solution, I got:

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist
/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist: Operation not permitted while System Integrity Protection is engaged

Instead, I followed these instructions, and it worked:

1. Go to System Preferences, Select Spotlight
2. Go to the Privacy tab in the Spotlight system preferences
3. Click the Plus button
4. Press Shift-Command-C to reveal your hard drives (if they are not available otherwise), or simply navigate to your hard drive (most likely MacintoshHD)
5. If you have more than one hard drive, hold the Command key and click your various drives to add them to your selection
6. Click the “Choose” button to add them to the Privacy list
7. Ignore the warning.
8. Remove the hard drive by clicking the minus sign.
9. Boom, no more sad days.

Solution 4:

Since macOS starting 10.15, all user data is on /System/Volumes/Data which is also where the .Spotlight-V100 folder is. To really force Spotlight to rebuild its cache, I've found this needs to be deleted. So I needed to do the following:

sudo mdutil -a -i off /
sudo mdutil -a -i off /System/Volumes/Data
sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist

sudo rm -Rf /System/Volumes/Data/.Spotlight-V100/

sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist
sudo mdutil -a -i on /
sudo mdutil -a -i on /System/Volumes/Data

Solution 5:

Have you tried removing the spotlight.plist in your user preferences. Similar problem with 10.7.5 and re-indexing wouldn't work until I moved the spotlight.plist to the desktop to be safe and then did a sudo mdutil -E / If that works you can delete the old .plist file.