4 ms·

Yeah even spotlight search sucks these days. When it first came out in Tiger or so it worked great. Now it's slow and it never finds what I'm looking for even i

Yeah even spotlight search sucks these days. When it first came out in Tiger or so it worked great. Now it's slow and it never finds what I'm looking for even if I type the exact name.

MiddleEndian 4y ago
That's too bad. Spotlight was fantastic then. Its ability to search for applications, file names, tags you set on files and inside the content of files was so incredibly convenient. Windows 7 also had a fantastic search mechanism in its Start Menu (although it came 4 years after Tiger's Spotlight) that has since been broken in Windows 8 and 10 for reasons unknown.
Tagbert 4y ago
Not to deny your experience and I’m sure that it is giving you problems, but I never have problems finding things with spotlight and the finder search. The files almost always come right up. the only thing I don’t like is when it has displayed a result and then it adds a late addition in place of the item that I was just about to click on. I’d rather it wait to display results until it had the full set. I do configure Finder to start its search in the current folder because that is usually where I want to start searching for a file and I want to limit the number of possible false positives. It’s easy to expand the search if needed. I have heard of people who force Spotlight to reindex their drive if they are having trouble with getting results. Have you tried doing that?
- GekkePrutser 4y ago
  I've tried reindexing yeah but it still does it. I normally run spotlight from the looking glass icon in the menu bar so there is no 'current folder'. What happens is that it turns up a whole ton of XML files, dat file etc instead of the files I'm looking for. They appear only later and at the end. In the beginning it had much more sense to keep that stuff out. And yeah I can exclude folders but I don't really want to have to micromanage that stuff. The whole point of Spotlight was not having to do that.

Yeah even spotlight search sucks these days. When it first came out in Tiger or so it worked great. Now it's slow and it never finds what I'm looking for even if I type the exact name.

MiddleEndian 4y ago

That's too bad. Spotlight was fantastic then. Its ability to search for applications, file names, tags you set on files and inside the content of files was so incredibly convenient. Windows 7 also had a fantastic search mechanism in its Start Menu (although it came 4 years after Tiger's Spotlight) that has since been broken in Windows 8 and 10 for reasons unknown.

Tagbert 4y ago

Not to deny your experience and I’m sure that it is giving you problems, but I never have problems finding things with spotlight and the finder search. The files almost always come right up. the only thing I don’t like is when it has displayed a result and then it adds a late addition in place of the item that I was just about to click on. I’d rather it wait to display results until it had the full set. I do configure Finder to start its search in the current folder because that is usually where I want to start searching for a file and I want to limit the number of possible false positives. It’s easy to expand the search if needed. I have heard of people who force Spotlight to reindex their drive if they are having trouble with getting results. Have you tried doing that?

GekkePrutser 4y ago
I've tried reindexing yeah but it still does it. I normally run spotlight from the looking glass icon in the menu bar so there is no 'current folder'. What happens is that it turns up a whole ton of XML files, dat file etc instead of the files I'm looking for. They appear only later and at the end. In the beginning it had much more sense to keep that stuff out. And yeah I can exclude folders but I don't really want to have to micromanage that stuff. The whole point of Spotlight was not having to do that.