App launcher: broken search feature

[SmakFairy]

Obviously the app launcher is a hot mess - along with most changes in Tahoe. But aside from UX design issues, the impotence of the actual Search feature itself is an astounding frustration. Am I missing something? Is mine the only one that doesn't work?

Put simply, ALMOST ALL apps simply never appear in search results, forcing me to scroll to find them. I have to do this ALL THE TIME, and it drives me crazy. For example, you can see here I have Lightroom installed - but it cannot be found by searching.

Same goes for almost all other Apps, including Utilities. BTW, when scrolling, the utility apps are listed under "Other", instead of "Utilities", unlike the name of the tab you click to bring them up. Using Spotlight instead of Apps delivers the same problem, except with lots more irrelevant results to wade through.

WTF Apple.

And of course, Launchpad is now just "Apps", which is not disambiguated. How tf are we (esp new users unfamiliar with macos) supposed to search the web to troubleshoot apps with generic names like "Apps" and "Passwords". We used to have poetically named products - "Keychain" and "Launchpad", and more. Now they've renamed them for NO reason and dumped the iconic work of past marketing teams in favor of generic terms that make it harder and boring-er for us to use. Apple keeps taking insanely great software and making it insanely trash.

 

[chabig]

This is almost always due to incomplete or corrupted Spotlight indexing. First, go to System Settings > Spotlight and make sure that search for apps is turned on.



Then I'd suggest restarting the computer, and waiting awhile because it might take some time to reindex.

If that doesn't fix it, the next larger step would be to go back to Spotlight settings. At the very bottom is a button titled, "Search Privacy". Click that and add your Applications folder to the list and click OK. This will tell Spotlight 'not' to search Applications. Wait a minute and then remove Applications from the privacy list. This will force a reindex of just that folder. Restart again if it's not quickly fixed.

The final step is to reindex the entire file system. Back in Search Privacy, add your entire hard drive, wait a bit, then remove it.

If none of those work, let us know.

 

[svenmany]

I have had problems with spotlight in Tahoe and rebuilding the index as @chabig suggested fixed it for me. My problem might have been the same - content that I knew existed was not appearing when searching.

I will say that since rebuilding the index, Spotlight has been working well for me, and it's been quite a while since doing that.

I suspect that the transition from Sequoia to Tahoe left some incompatibility in place that needed to be eliminated. On the chance that this was the case and if I were in your shoes, I would do the full rebuild of the volume's index rather than just the Application folder.

 

[SmakFairy]

This is almost always due to incomplete or corrupted Spotlight indexing. First, go to System Settings > Spotlight and make sure that search for apps is turned on.

View attachment 2620972

Then I'd suggest restarting the computer, and waiting awhile because it might take some time to reindex.

If that doesn't fix it, the next larger step would be to go back to Spotlight settings. At the very bottom is a button titled, "Search Privacy". Click that and add your Applications folder to the list and click OK. This will tell Spotlight 'not' to search Applications. Wait a minute and then remove Applications from the privacy list. This will force a reindex of just that folder. Restart again if it's not quickly fixed.

The final step is to reindex the entire file system. Back in Search Privacy, add your entire hard drive, wait a bit, then remove it.

If none of those work, let us know.

Followed these steps and they worked a charm. Thank you!

My computer restarts itself on a regular basis (sometimes crashing, sometimes old battery dies prematurely) but Search did not improve until I restarted it myself. I wouldn't have guessed that reindexing would not happen without a particular restart sequence, but I suppose that is the lesson here.

Thanks for your input 🙏