Finder's find function not finding things

[thebart]

Ventura 13.3.1 M1 mini. On an external SSD, the find function (cmd+F) in Finder is failing in strange ways.

I can find files by: name contains _____, or file kind is audio.

But if I try to find by: file size > 10 kb, or file extension = mp3 or .mp3, I get nothing when I should clearly get a lot of results

On the internal ssd, it works as expected.

I have no folder added to spotlight privacy.

mdutil -sav shows indexing is disabled on the external ssd. I guess that's the problem? But it still finds files by name and kind, though?

Thoughts and suggestions?

 

[chown33]

Some data is searchable even when indexing is disabled. I forget exactly what works, but it's pretty limited, basically just filename and a handful of other things.

I thought file size would be one of the things, but maybe not. It's been a few years since I looked at this, and it might well vary by OS version, too.

 

[thenowayhome]

I had this problem on various exfat drives formatted with a laptop running win 10 64.
I had the problem with a 2019 MBP 2.6GHz macOS 13.4.

I confirmed my permissions:
ls -l /System/Volumes/Data/Volumes/

I confirmed indexing:
mdutil -sav

I ran:
sudo rm -Rfv /Volumes/~/.Spotlight-V100/

I ran:
sudo mdutil -E /Volumes/~/drive

I didn't restart.
I only ran rm -Rfv and mdutil -E on one specific drive but two others followed suit without intervention.
In finder, I entered a period and eventually it shortly worked.

I referred to the following links to create the change:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/spotlight-still-not-working-on-certain-external-drives.2335432/https://iboysoft.com/news/cant-search-external-hard-drive-mac.html