Applications are not showing up in Spolight searches

[Dane95]

Mac OS Big Sur version 11.1 - MacBook Pro 13" 2020.

For as long as I've been running Mac OS, I've been using Spotlight as an app launcher. It's incredibly easy to type in a few letters and then being able to launch an app. Lately, I haven't been able to utilize Spotlight this way, as the search results are excluding a lot of apps. I'm not exactly sure when this happened, but I have tried a number of things to get Spotlight back to normal - without success.

It still works with a lot of Apples native apps like Mail and Settings, but even Safari I can't find using a search. I have tried typing in "Safari.app", but even that only suggests me a safari search of that input as well as a couple of Safari extensions in the App Store.

I've looked in Settings, of course, where every possible option is checked as categories allowed to come up in searches. And at the same time nothing is excluded in the privacy tab.

I've tried re-indexing my harddrive - both from adding and then removing the hard drive in the spotlight settings, but also by using a terminal command. Still no change in the application search results.

Does anyone know of anything I can do to get Spotlight back in order?

 

[AVR2]

I can't help, but I'm seeing the same behaviour in Catalina, specifically for TextEdit.

Any other app, I only need to type the first 2-3 letters in Spotlight and I can launch it, but it absolutely will not see TextEdit.

 

[gilby101]

I suspect the Data part of your boot volume has a corrupt index. You can use the Terminal command mdutil -sav to see the state of indexes for all disks. There should be indexes for both / (the read only root volume) and for /System/Volumes/Data

Note that Safari is on the Data volume along with other installed Apple and third party apps. The macOS apps are the only ones on the / read-only part of the boot volume.

You should read man mdutil which is all about managing indexes. My guess is that you will need mdutil with either (or both) the -i or -E option on /System/Volume/Data. But do that at your own risk until you understand what they do.