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Spotlight not searching in text documents

Is it no longer possible to use spotlight (or search in finder) to search for a word in a text document?

With the old macOS I was used to being able to use spotlight (or search in finder) when I wanted to search for a specific word that I knew was to be found somewhere within the text documents (pdf, word, rtf, ...) on my hard drive. Now, it seems, this is no longer possible: While a search for a specific word in spotlight and finder gave no results, when looking for the same word through the dropbox desktop app (using the icon in the menu bar) it worked perfectly fine, giving me all the desired results.

I looked into spotlight system preferences and all boxes are ticked (except Siri). Does someone have a clue?


MacBook Air 13″, macOS 12.0

Posted on Nov 14, 2021 2:24 PM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Nov 15, 2021 6:07 AM

In System Preferences > Spotlight > Search Results, I have every category selected except Siri Suggestions. If you haven't previously, open that Spotlight Preferences > Privacy panel, drag and drop your Desktop Macintosh HD icon onto it, wait 10 seconds, and then select it, and click [-] to remove Macintosh HD. Quit System Preferences.


At this point, Spotlight will begin indexing your drive for the Search Result categories that are selected. Your Mac will slow during the indexing process and you can observe its progress by launching the menu bar Spotlight icon. Here, I have chosen to locate PDF documents, and you can see the indexing occurring:



When the Spotlight indexing is done, and assuming that the text file that you are attempting to match a word too is on your Macintosh HD startup drive, you should have similar success as I demonstrated, provided that your search string exists in the document. Words with white space in them will need to be double-quoted to be found.

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Nov 15, 2021 6:07 AM in response to JMZO

In System Preferences > Spotlight > Search Results, I have every category selected except Siri Suggestions. If you haven't previously, open that Spotlight Preferences > Privacy panel, drag and drop your Desktop Macintosh HD icon onto it, wait 10 seconds, and then select it, and click [-] to remove Macintosh HD. Quit System Preferences.


At this point, Spotlight will begin indexing your drive for the Search Result categories that are selected. Your Mac will slow during the indexing process and you can observe its progress by launching the menu bar Spotlight icon. Here, I have chosen to locate PDF documents, and you can see the indexing occurring:



When the Spotlight indexing is done, and assuming that the text file that you are attempting to match a word too is on your Macintosh HD startup drive, you should have similar success as I demonstrated, provided that your search string exists in the document. Words with white space in them will need to be double-quoted to be found.

Dec 31, 2021 12:10 PM in response to VikingOSX

"At this point, Spotlight will begin indexing your drive for the Search Result categories that are selected. Your Mac will slow during the indexing process and you can observe its progress by launching the menu bar Spotlight icon. "


Um, nope. I've tried this 3 times in the 2 weeks since I bought a new MBA that runs Monterey, and it still doesn't work.

I'd be grateful for any other ideas.

Nov 14, 2021 3:30 PM in response to JMZO

Perhaps for you, but not me. I can Spotlight search a text file and find the word that I am looking for in Monterey 12.0.1 with the following:


kind:text "lensmake"


That lists the exif.txt document on my Desktop that contains the EXIF metadata for an image, and the keyword LensMake is in that document.


I have another text file on my Desktop that has a "|" punctuated header fields, one of which contains "price":


kind:text "|price|"


and that document is the first in the found list.

Spotlight not searching in text documents

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