Spotlight Search Mac OS
How to set the order of Spotlight search results in Mac OS. Here’s what you need to do to customize Spotlight search priorities in Mac OS X: To start System Preferences on a Mac, go to the Apple menu; Select the ‘Spotlight’ icon to adjust the search settings; You will see a list of search categories, you can drag them any way you want. When you search in Outlook 2016 for Mac or Outlook for Mac 2011 on Mac OS X, be aware of the following: Mac OS includes Spotlight Search. Mac OS controls the indexing of the hard disk for Spotlight Search. Both versions of Outlook for Mac rely on Spotlight Search to provide search results for Outlook data. Mac OS X 10.0 (code named Cheetah) is the first major release and version of macOS, Apple's desktop and server operating system. Mac OS X 10.0 was released on March 24, 2001 for a price of US$129. It was the successor of the Mac OS X Public Beta and the predecessor of Mac OS X 10.1 (code named Puma).
Search and Spotlight
Click on the Apple Menu at the top and choose System Preferences Spotlight. Make sure that you are not excluding apps related to your search in your preferences here. You find all your apps on the search preferences tab. Mac OS X El Capitan ISO – Download Mac OS El Capitan ISO Setup Files Free: The MacBook and the Apple’s Mac are the second most widely used and famous portable Computers. The first place is occupied by the Family of Windows Computers, this is due to their cheaper prices, and ease of access.
Quick access to content is key to an efficient workflow, and there are several ways you can make it easy for people to locate your app's content.
Spotlight
Spotlight is a powerful search technology that makes it easy to locate files and content across the system. Using Spotlight, people can search for things using meaningful attributes like the intended audience for a document or the orientation of an image.
Make your app’s content searchable. You can share content with Spotlight by making it indexable and specifying descriptive attributes—known as metadata. Spotlight extracts, stores, and organizes this information to allow for fast, comprehensive searches. For developer guidance, see Core Spotlight.
Define metadata for your custom file types. Supply a Spotlight Importer plug-in that describes the types of metadata your file format contains. For developer guidance, see Spotlight Importer Programming Guide.
Use Spotlight to offer advanced file-search capabilities within the context of your app. For example, you might include a button that instantly initiates a Spotlight search based on the user’s selection. You might then display a custom window that presents the search results or a filtered subset of them.
Use the standard Open and Save dialogs. When opening or saving a document, people often need to locate a file or folder in an atypical location. The standard dialogs include a built-in search field that can be used to search and filter the entire system. For related guidance, see File Handling.
Implement a Quick Look generator if your app produces custom file types. A Quick Look generator enables other apps, including Spotlight, to show previews of your documents. These previews can be tremendously helpful when trying to locate a specific document. See Quick Look.
Consider using Spotlight behind the scenes. For example, an app could let people choose a broad file category like images to sync with a remote server, and then use Spotlight to find those files.
In-App Content Search
While Spotlight is tuned to locate files quickly, it’s not intended for performing extensive content searching within an app. An app that stores data in database records, for example, shouldn’t base its database search on Spotlight because the data aren’t stored in separate files.
Use system APIs to enable fine-grained textual searching. The system-provided APIs support phrase-based searching, prefix/suffix/substring searching, Boolean searching, summarization, relevance ranking, and more. For developer guidance, see Search Kit.
Let people save searches whenever possible. Users appreciate being able to perform specific searches again, especially if they spent time defining (and refining) useful criteria.
Find Windows
A Find window is a nonmodal dialog used to search for content within a document. A Find window lets people specify search criteria, including an item to search for and options for narrowing the scope of the search. Options when performing a text-based search, for example, might include whole-word and case-matching searches. The Find window is typically displayed by choosing a Find menu item in the Edit menu (or pressing its equivalent keyboard shortcut). See Edit Menu.
If your app is document-based, consider implementing a Find window. Most document-based apps include Find windows, and users are accustomed to looking for and using them.
Offer find and replace functionality. While searching is great for locating content, it’s not ideal when a user has to manually change each found result. If a search feature is accompanied by a replace feature, the user can automatically change all found results in a single step.
Consider letting people perform multi-document find operations. In an app that lets people edit multiple documents at once, the ability to perform a global search—and replace too, if applicable—across all open documents can be a valuable time-saving feature.
Content Filtering
Mac Spotlight Search Not Working
Document searching is important, but not all apps are document-based. For example, some apps present content-rich views—like a presentation in Keynote—that can be overwhelming when they're extensive. Users may appreciate the ability to filter these types of views to quickly find specific items.
Use a search field and scope bar to enable content filtering in a view. A search field lets people initiate text-based searches in a large collection of values and a scope bar helps them refine or filter results. For guidance, see Search Fields, Scope Bars, and Scope Buttons.
New updates are being added at the bottom of this story…….
Original story (published on December 15, 2020) follows:
Some Mac users who’ve installed the macOS Big Sur update on their devices are claiming that the Spotlight search function no longer works as it did prior to the update.
Users are disappointed since they aren’t able to rely on Spotlight to find the files, apps, documents, and other items they want to access quickly.
Moreover, there isn’t just a single problem that has ruined the user experience. Instead, there are several issues that degrade the function.
A user has listed some of the major issues that they noticed with the Spotlight search function after installing the macOS Big Sur update on their computer. We’ve shared a screenshot of it below:
As you can tell by the number of upvotes and comments on the user’s post on Reddit, many users who installed the macOS Big Sur updates are facing similar issues and agree that Apple has messed up Spotlight.
But this is also only part of a bigger picture because some users claim that Spotlight no longer works on their Macs after the macOS Big Sur update.
According to those who are dealing with this issue, Spotlight does not return any results when searching for files, apps, documents, and other items.
(Source)
ITs been weeks since I downloaded big sur and spotlight is still not working consistently. How has apple not patched this yet? (Source)
It seems that under Big Sur spotlight no longer indexes the content of RTF files. (To verify this create one with textedit, save it, search). This must be a bug / regression right? What could be a more canonical example of spotlight usage than finding text in RTF? (Source)
Ever since I updated to Big Sur, Spotlight is working pretty bad, sometimes it brings no results and sometimes it just freezes everything, apparently it only gets back to working after a system reboot 🙁 (Source)
While the issue does not affect all macOS Big Sur users, it’s clear that some are having terrible luck with getting Spotlight to function as normal.
Fortunately, there are a few workarounds that seem to have fixed most of the issues users are experiencing with the Spotlight search function.
Mac Spotlight Search
Workarounds for macOS Big Sur Spotlight issues
1) Uninstall Little Snitch:
According to one user, the Little Snitch program might be the reason behind the Spotlight search issues for some. Therefore, uninstalling the program and reinstalling it should fix the problem.
uninstall LS completely. enjoy Spotlight working as expected. reinstall LS. enjoy Spotlight still working as expected. shake head about stupid LS bug that seems impossible to fix. (Source)
2) Give it time to index files:
Some users might be noticing the issue because Spotlight has not been able to index all the files on the computer after installing macOS Big Sur.
However, after some time, the problem automatically disappears since the system has enough time to index all the files on the Mac. Thus, you may want to give it some time for all files to be indexed.
I do not know how to reproduce this or whether it will come back, the problem came out of the blue and just vanished again. The best solution so far seems to me to just keep the machine running through the night and hope it will be done with whatever task that causes the problems by the next morning.. (Source)
3) Switch to Alfred:
It’s widely accepted that Alfred is better than the default Spotlight feature on macOS and thus many users who are fed up with the broken search function on macOS Big Sur are recommending others to switch to Alfred.
Why not use Alfred? Personally, Spotlight always felt like a gimped version of Alfred to me. (Source)
At present, Apple has not acknowledged any issues reported by users when using Spotlight. The company has just rolled out the Big Sur 11.1 update, however, we didn’t come across any reports of the issue being fixed.
Nonetheless, we will continue to keep an eye out for any developments on the matter and will post an update if something relevant surfaces.
In the meantime, check out our dedicated tracker to know more about the status of bugs and issues found on macOS Big Sur.
Apparently, the Spotlight search function workaround that involved uninstalling Little Snitch also addresses the issue where the Recents folder wouldn’t show any content, but the search results appear when searching from within the folder.
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