Spotlight Search weirdness

[donawalt]

Search seems to be working strangely - this on a new MacBook Pro I Just received yesterday.

If I do a spotlight search from the menubar magnifying glass, and say search for the title of a file in my Documents folder, it comes up in the documents category almost instantaneously.

But if I open Finder, and type the same search in, searching only in my Documents folder, well - this most recent time I stopped it in a minute and a half because nothing came up. On another MacBook Pro it comes up instantaneously in Finder as well. Note Documents is in iCloud, yet this does not impact searching on 2 other MacBook Pro's.

Why is search not working in Finder yet indexing etc. seems current and working fine in spotlight search? Aren't they the same?

EDIT: The same thing happens in the Downloads folder, can't find a file name - and that's not in iCloud, so it's not any iCloud confusion.

 

[donawalt]

The problem is more specifically that Finder search in a folder does nothing, but the same search in My Mac works instantly.

I found the solution here in the Apple Community, I paste it here slightly modified for what I found (I am on Sonoma 14.1.1) - this worked perfectly for me too! Many thanks to Barney-15E there!

This is tuned to an Apple Silicon Mac, you can probably figure it out for an older Mac if it happens there:

• Restart into Recovery (Shutdown, hit power button, then press and hold Power until Options appear)
• Open Disk Utility
  • Select Data volume and Mount. It will ask for a Password if it is encrypted (FileVault).
• Exit Disk Utility.
• From the Utilities menu, Select Terminal
• Run these commands:

cd /Volumes/Data

rm -R .Spotlight-V100

• Restart normally
• Open Terminal and run this command:

sudo mdutil -E /

sudo will ask for an admin password.

Once it finishes indexing, it should display found items in their folders.