Ventura 13.4 broke Spotlight

Carlos Garcia5 wrote:

Dear Apple:

Ventura has made Spotlight useless for a lot of us. Please get on that.

For those of you with similar problems, I had to do a clean install through recovery in order to get it somewhat working again, however, about 3 categories of web results and other irrelevant non-sense is being give priority over local files, and the search results are not accurate. Spotlight in Ventura (13.4) no longer ide… - Apple Community PLEASE FIX THIS. I wish I had not updated to Ventura because of this. Can't find anything, can't use Spotlight to launch applications, a total mess.

Apple doesn't read here in this user-to-user forum for feedback or suggestions. You can, however, let them know your concerns here:

Product Feedback - Apple

Did you drag and drop the drive to be indexed in Spotlight > Privacy panel and forget to remove it from that panel? It won't get indexed until you do. Is this your startup drive, or some application masquerading a cloud filesystem such as Google Drive, or DropBox as a pretend local filesystem?

Remember, only Chuck Norris can break Spotlight…

I find no degradation in Spotlight functionality with macOS 13.4 from previous major versions. I use the Spotlight reserved words as I always have and find what I seek.

Yeah same here -- although I was getting System Settings results over Applications. "Messa" would return something weird from Settings, and I launch Messages all the time using Spotlight BEFORE 13.4. For now, putting the folder in privacy and removing it seems to have fixed it, but Spotlight was introduced in 2005 and Apple's obsession with unifying the codebase between macOS and iOS is really "paying off" for consumers /s.

Oh, I almost forgot: I just had to turn off Spotlight on System Settings entirely, and that "fixed" it, although since they have moved almost everything around (and removed a lot of great features) in Settings, that was actually useful. Just not as useful as using spotlight as an application launcher. Maybe this is also Apple's obsession with privacy -- but I would happily trade an opt-in "track my actions" for the smallest drop of consistency and learning from things I have done tens of thousands of times across dozens of Macs. Oh well!

If you go to System Settings, Siri & Spotlight, check to see if the list under spotlight, under search results and highlight all the file types you want to have searched.