Spotlight finds totally obvious things online and nothing on my drive!

[romanaOne]

Is there a way to get Yosemite Spotlight to NOT SEARCH THE INTERNET and to just search my ENTIRE HARD DRIVE, including various messy Developer, System, and Macports (/opt/) directories?

For example, if I want to find some dumb header file that is causing Macports (or Fink or Homebew) to fail to build, all Spotlight gives me is worthless internet search results.

Another example: suppose I can't remember where the Menu Extras folder is buried, Spotlight returns no local results and a bunch of internet crap.

 

[Chriss316]

Sounds as though your hard drive isn't indexed, indexing should of happened automatically during first log in of installation unless it was interrupted, go into your system preferences and open up spotlight prefs and check to see if everything you want searchable is selected in the search results tab, if it is then you can re-index your HDD by clicking on the privacy tab beside search results and then drag the whole volume HDD onto the list and click ok if it asks you to then you can remove the volume from the list by clicking the minus button at the bottom left of the list and close preferences and spotlight will start re-indexing the HDD, depending on the speed of your computer and the size of everything on the HDD indexing can take anywhere from a couple minutes to 2 hours to fully index

 

[FishCow]

Sometimes even after forcing Spotlight to re-index, you can still have no results in your searches.
Seems to be a permissions problem which can be fixed by reseting ACL's.
Happened to me and the only way to get it working again was to boot into recovery partition.
Type: reset password into terminal.
When the reset password utility launches, select your OS X HDD at the top, skip down to the bottom and click on reset home folder permissions and ACL's or whatever it says.
Then reboot into your main drive.
Spotlight should re-index yet again, but you should actually see results this time around.

Hope it helps

 

[romanaOne]

I found this cool thing preinstalled called locate. An added bonus is that it also is part of most Linux distributions!

http://osxdaily.com/2011/11/02/enable-and-use-the-locate-command-in-the-mac-os-x-terminal/

Spotlight seems to find everything in my home directory and subdirectories; I'm just not sure it knows about things outside /Users/$HOME.

The hell with spotlight, at least for dev/hacking.

 

[Chriss316]

Sometimes even after forcing Spotlight to re-index, you can still have no results in your searches.
Seems to be a permissions problem which can be fixed by reseting ACL's.
Happened to me and the only way to get it working again was to boot into recovery partition.
Type: reset password into terminal.
When the reset password utility launches, select your OS X HDD at the top, skip down to the bottom and click on reset home folder permissions and ACL's or whatever it says.
Then reboot into your main drive.
Spotlight should re-index yet again, but you should actually see results this time around.

Hope it helps

Interesting, never actually thought about permissions having an effect on indexing


Locate is very useful and flexible but you can also just use OSX's search function (command F) to do the same as locate instead of having to do a lot of command typing, you can apply a large amount of search requirements just as quickly within finder and have direct access to the results. Essentially a GUI equivalent of locate, you could also couple it up with automator to locate and filter files too, basically you'll never be stuck for options

---Edit---
As for spotlight not searching outside of users you need to set spotlight to a higher directory than users, that may be where a permissions issue came into play or you need to use the privacy tab to start indexing from the HDD's highest directory.

 

[FishCow]

Interesting, never actually thought about permissions having an effect on indexing


Locate is very useful and flexible but you can also just use OSX's search function (command F) to do the same as locate instead of having to do a lot of command typing, you can apply a large amount of search requirements just as quickly within finder and have direct access to the results. Essentially a GUI equivalent of locate, you could also couple it up with automator to locate and filter files too, basically you'll never be stuck for options

---Edit---
As for spotlight not searching outside of users you need to set spotlight to a higher directory than users, that may be where a permissions issue came into play or you need to use the privacy tab to start indexing from the HDD's highest directory.

Yeah it's pretty interesting, and yet works
Not directly affecting indexing, but the ability to return results maybe?

In my case, Spotlight couldn't find any files, even the default "All my Files" Smart folder was not working
command F - - Kind "Any" System Files "Are included" - no results until I repaired / reset ACL's.
Who knew right?
Followed this procedure and all was well.

"locate" has been around forever, but apparently depreciated on OS X for "Security" reasons, yet you can still use it and also rebuild the locate.db and search within the terminal.