Apple Has a Spotlight Problem And Needs To Fix It

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Apple's got some big problems with a fundamental feature of Mac OS, Spotlight. Let's talk about it. Now, a primary part of Mac OS is Spotlight. It's both the engine with which you search for files and other things on your Mac, and also it's a menu where you access that search. With Mac OS Tahoe, Spotlight is even more prominent than it was before, which only highlights its problems. So here I am using Spotlight with command space. This brings up the Spotlight search menu, which now on Tahoe has got different sections, so you could focus on various things, or you could just use the main Spotlight search and search for something like say a file. And you get all sorts of results here and you could see how it's working well for me at the moment. But a big problem with Spotlight is it all too often doesn't work very well. If you look at Apple's discussion forums, if you look at the comments at my website, if you look at Reddit and other places, you'll find there plenty of times when people say Spotlight isn't finding files, even when they search for the exact name of the file and they could see it's right there, and this happens if they're using Spotlight through the Spotlight menu, or if they're in Finder and they use the search feature here, which is also using Spotlight index to find what they want. Now Spotlight occasionally not working for people isn't something new in macOS Tahoe. It's been around for years. And when it happens, Apple usually just advises people to rebuild their Spotlight index, but it's definitely happening way too often. Apple needs to fix whatever bugs there are in Spotlight that prevents it from having a valid index. At this point, I even say it should be priority number one for macOS, and perhaps there should even be some sort of background task that looks at Spotlight and make sure that it's working, that obvious files are found in the Spotlight index, and if not, should be repairing Spotlight in the background without the user having to do anything. Now, whether or not Apple can fix the bugs with this, there should be an easier way for you to manually rebuild the Spotlight index. Right now, Apple recommends on the very website, a way to do it that's not obvious. They have you rebuilding the Spotlight index by going into system settings. If I do it here, I go at system settings and then I look for Spotlight here on the left. Then I go to the bottom here to search privacy. And then here's where you can exclude things from Spotlight. They want you to add your whole home folder to this and then remove it as a way to rebuild Spotlight, but it shouldn't be that convoluted. You can do it in terminal using the mdutil command like this and entering your password, but you shouldn't have to do that either. It's really way past time for Apple to actually add a section to Spotlight in system settings where you can both test the Spotlight index and rebuild it. Having two simple buttons in system settings under Spotlight, one to test the Spotlight index that should look at either all the files or maybe a sample of them and just to see whether or not the Spotlight index looks like it's complete, that makes sense. And then having a rebuild button there so you can trigger the rebuild without having to know the secret way to do it. And then perhaps here as well, they can actually have the progress there showing you how well it's doing. And when you do re-index, it should re-index in an intelligent way. It should look at apps first. There are not that many of them should be able to quickly re-index starting with the apps so you can use Spotlight to launch apps, then it should look at files in the most obvious places like your documents folder and desktop folder. So it gets those only going to files like in your library and other places later on. It's going to take a long time to re-index everything, but there's no reason it can't be done in an order that's smart. So even after you start a re-index, you can use Spotlight for most things right away. Now, in addition to that, under search privacy now, you can add things that you don't want to appear in Spotlight. This needs to be improved as well. First of all, you can add folders and files to this, but adding files usually doesn't work. It only works if you add folders to it. So for instance, now, if I do command space and then command one to go to applications, I may want to remove some of these applications so they don't appear here in this list. There's no reason you shouldn't be able to actually remove these items. You should be able to go in here and add them like this. And I understand that some of these are packages, which looked like folders, and that's why they're not particularly working there, but even regular apps like this will not then be removed. You should be able to remove individual files like apps so they don't appear in Spotlight. And in addition to that, you should be able to actually remove file types as well. So if you have some app that's creating a ton of files of some special data type, you should be able to say files with this extension shouldn't appear in the Spotlight index. Plus, right in Spotlight, particularly when you're looking at apps, you should be able to control click on an app like this and select right here in the context menu that you want to remove this item from Spotlight index, or at least remove it from appearing here in a Spotlight search. This will improve the app section of Spotlight if nothing else. Next problem with Spotlight is it's often too slow. When you search for something, it sometimes takes a few seconds to appear. If you search for an app, it sometimes takes a few seconds for that to appear as well. Those are actually very fast response times. Sometimes it takes longer. A lot of you know this pain. It should take time for Spotlight results, especially for apps, but with Spotlight, often the app or file isn't there by the time you get to the return key and the impression is that your Mac and Mac OS and Spotlight are all very slow. It's just Spotlight that's slow, but it shouldn't be. This needs to be worked on at least for launching apps. Another big problem with Spotlight is the reasons list here in the finder. Now you may think this doesn't have anything to do with Spotlight, but it's using the Spotlight index. To find the files you've most recently opened. The problem is that many files that you expect to see here have never been opened. They have no date last open, so they don't appear here in recents, like a file that you downloaded or a file that you've created by exporting from an app. If you look here in downloads, you'll see that date added is the key date for these. The problem is even if you create your own safe search or smart folder for recents, you've got date last opened and date added as two separate things there. In addition to date created in date modified. What you should be able to do with a Spotlight search is search for last date or recent date, which takes a look at date created, date modified, date last opened and date added and get the most recent of those four. Nothing new needs to be added to the Spotlight index. It's just that you should be able to search the Spotlight index for which is the most recent of those four. Have recent date or last date here as the results for recents. And then the recents list that's built into macOS should then display files using that date. That way you could see downloaded files, exported files and opened files all together here in recents. And you'll get exactly what you expect when you go here. Plus you'll be able to use that recent date in your own searches, safe searches and smart folders. So in short, there are six things Apple needs to do. They should fix whatever the bugs are that make Spotlight break so often for people. They should make it really easy to re-index it if you need to. When it re-indexes, it should give priority to some kinds of files like apps. You should be able to exclude not just folders, but individual files and file types for the Spotlight index, especially apps to make the Spotlight menu more useful. It should work faster so you can launch apps without any perceived delay. And you should be able to search using the most recent of the created, modified, added, opened dates to have more useful searches and also improve the recents list. And here are two other things Apple should add. The path for the file should also be stored in the Spotlight index. So you can actually use the path as something you search for. So you can look for files in more than just one folder or exclude a folder from a search. Now I realize that's going to cause trouble, especially if somebody's going to take like a folder filled with files and move it to a different location. The paths have to be updated, but it should still be done even if there's a little more overhead involved. It just comes up too often that somebody wants to look in, say, a few folders rather than one folder for a special file or to exclude a folder or two in the search. And finally, now that we have four different sections in the Spotlight menu, there should be keyboard shortcuts for each one of those. Right now, if you go to system settings and then keyboard and then keyboard shortcuts, and then you go to Spotlight, you have your primary Spotlight search keyboard shortcut command space, and you can create your own for only the first section, show apps. But there should also be one for files, actions, and the clipboard. Just give us three more options here and allow us to decide whether or not we want to have a keyboard shortcut that goes right to it. So I know this isn't my typical video where I show you how to do things, but if you're frustrated by one of these deficiencies in Spotlight, at least you now know you're not alone. And you can go to apple.com slash feedback slash Mac OS, and this is where you can actually request new features for Apple. So if you want some or all of these things, you may want to use that form. I think if Apple were to improve the reliability and speed of Spotlight, it would go a long way to improving how people feel about Mac OS. Thanks for watching.