Spotlight -

Hello,

Yes, you can force Spotlight to re-index your Mac.

Please see this support doc–

Rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac - Apple Support:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201716

Ordinarily, Spotlight will index newly created files so quickly that there is no hope of detecting any progress. However, on first boot, or deliberate attempts to rebuild the Spotlight index, the opening of the Spotlight panel from 🔍 will show an indexing operating is in progress as below (from macOS 11.4):

Safe Boot, (holding Shift key down at startup), does the problem occur in Safe Mode? Could take 10 minutes.

Safe mode attempts to repair Disks & clears lots of caches & loads safe Drivers, & prevents loading of 3rd party extensions, so if Safe Mode works try again in regular boot.

Open Terminal and run each of these...

sudo mdutil -E /

This basically asks for temporary super user status, which is why Terminal may ask you for your password (it may not if you’ve used a sudo command recently or are already logged in as a super user or root. The command asks the unix tool mdutil to reindex the spotlight database for everything on the computer, including external drives, mounted disk images, etc. To re-index only for a specific drive, use the /Volumes path. For example, for an external drive named “MiniMe,” the command would look like this:

sudo mdutil -i on /

Rebuilding a drive index can take a long time, so be prepared to wait whether you do it through the System Preference panel or the command line. A few minutes normally.