Spotlight Search not displaying results on macOS despite indexing

As per another users idea on the same subject in a different thread, it started to show up instantly. This time it worked for me.

I checked my own start-up items on the settings. (System settings>general>startup items and extentions) There was one calculator app on the "open at login" list and a bunch of old items down below on the "allow in the background". I erased removed the item on the login and made some cleaning on the background list. Restarted. Bammm! All files started to show instantly. No new indexing etc. Because it was already there and something was blocking it. Thanks for the suggestion!

(since I removed all at once, I am not sure which was the guilty app)

After a lot of frustration, I was able to get Tahoe Spotlight to work correctly with some but not all of the "App Background Activity” switches in “Login Items and Extensions”  switched off. One or more of the items that I turned off appeared to be causing the problem, but I have not been able to narrow it down any further. Some other people report in Apple Discussions that the Adobe items cause the issue, which may be true, but there are definitely other culprits since Spotlight still would not work for me after turning off just my Adobe items.

Start by turning these all off and I believe you will see that Spotlight works correctly. Then turn them back on one by one and see what happens. This is very reminiscent of the old System Extension conflicts that existed (and infuriated) in pre-OSX days.

For sure, it seems as though the bug is related to login extensions.

I also had no results in Spotlight file search (though the Files pane shows suggestions and recents). I triggered an index rebuild by adding my internal drive to System Settings > Spotlight > Search Privacy then removing it. Spotlight showed an Indexing progress bar for a while (driven by appropriate processes like spotlightknowledged running mainly on my efficiency cores), after which...still no results from a Spotlight search.

Rather than Terminal, I quit Spotlight and spotlightknowledged processes in Activity Monitor, after which expected search results were shown.

Having said that, using the search bar in a Finder window (top right) produced expected results initially (before rebuilding the Spotlight index) and still does.

A bug report can be filed with Apple here:

Feedback - macOS - Apple

I'm having the exact same problem. Spotlight was working flawlessly on Sequoia, and immediately stopped working properly after upgrading to Tahoe.

The problem is that Spotlight file search does not work. It will search apps, but file search does not work at all. I've tried rebuilding the Spotlight search index twice, and also reinstalled Tahoe to see if that will resolve it. Those options did not resolve the problem.

I've contacted Apple senior advisors, and they've informed me this is being tracked by the engineers, and they took a bunch of log files and screenshare recordings from me to assist in searching for, and fixing the bug. I hope they release an update to fix this soon.

In the meantime, I can still use Finder search function to find files, but this is an additional unnecessary step that I do not wish to take permanently.

Same problem for me after upgrading to Tahoe. No results for any document search, just empty. Application search works fine but icloud documents does not show up anything. Tried to kill spotlight from activity monitor as advised above but did not work for me. It is a clear bug that prevents the results to appear.

Finder search for documents on left-top corner works fine for me too.