Searching - Rubbish!

[africano]

Why is searching on the mac so BAD! I have a macbook pro OSX 10.9.5 and the search functions has ALWAYS been terrible ever since I bought it years ago......

On my PC I can search and it works really well....on my macbook, I click on an external hard drive and type something in the search box and NOTHING comes up.....

So, is this just me or is the search function from macs rubbish??

 

[Samuelsan2001]

Why is searching on the mac so BAD! I have a macbook pro OSX 10.9.5 and the search functions has ALWAYS been terrible ever since I bought it years ago......

On my PC I can search and it works really well....on my macbook, I click on an external hard drive and type something in the search box and NOTHING comes up.....

So, is this just me or is the search function from macs rubbish??

No idea I know where everything is on my drives.

Spotlight seems to work fine on the few occasions I've used it though.

 

[africano]

I know but when you have a big hd and need to find something fast and you type in the name or something along the lines of the name and NOTHING shows up......on my PC it always shows something.......but on my mac I can't seem to find anything.

This is with external HDD when they are connected....at the top I click on a tab that says search on "the name of my hdd" and nothing ever shows up.

Even when I put in the name of a file I know exists on the hdd.

 

[Samuelsan2001]

I know but when you have a big hd and need to find something fast and you type in the name or something along the lines of the name and NOTHING shows up......on my PC it always shows something.......but on my mac I can't seem to find anything.

This is with external HDD when they are connected....at the top I click on a tab that says search on "the name of my hdd" and nothing ever shows up.

Even when I put in the name of a file I know exists on the hdd.

Ok it sounds like your privacy settings is stopping OSX from indexiing your external HDD, quick warning this will take a long time and use a fair bit of your computers resources so do it overnight.

Here is a guide to get it to work

http://smallbusiness.chron.com/make-mac-file-names-external-drive-30728.html

 

[leman]

My experience is exactly the opposite. Searching on Mac has always been very fast and precise for me. In contrast, Windows 8 can't find anything.

 

[deepakvrao]

Same here. I find searching an my Mac a dream. Win 8 works better than previous versions, but is too slow. Never tried searching an ext HDD though.

 

[Gwendolini]

It is also dependent on the file system used on the external HDD. Is it using the Mac OS Extended file system or one of those Windows ones?

 

[seanbalme]

I completely agree with africano. Searching for something on your computer is usually pretty easy but absolutely awful when looking for anything on an external hard drive or even a thumb drive. I work with a lot of files and this is wasting a lot of time for me. This should be a basic function for any computer