Spotlight can’t index the contents of document versions to make them searchable. How you can change that and save having to browse those versions when you need to recover old content.
Spotlight
Spotlight fails to index the content of text files starting with odd characters like ‘LG’ and ‘Draw’, Although we understand this is caused by checking the file type using file(1), this suggests an explanation of why it should do that. And whether it will ever get fixed for Intel Macs.
If generating QuickLook thumbnails and previews, and indexing metadata for Spotlight, depend on UTIs, how come they tolerate misleading file extensions? A simple practical demo.
You realise that a few hours ago you trashed an important file by accident. How can you search your Time Machine backups without looking through them one at a time?
Soon after introducing iCloud and iCloud Drive, Apple changed the way most metadata was handled to ensure it was synced up to the cloud. Recently this has been reversed, and little metadata is now synced. Was this an accident or intentional? What is the workaround?
Traces the path of metadata from inside a PDF document and its extended attributes, to those in Spotlight’s indexes and displayed in the Finder. Only a third survived that journey.
This new version adds a drag-and-drop window to inspect the metadata of files using mdimport and mdls.
A summary of iCloud Drive syncing of attributes, data, extended attributes, document versions (complex), Spotlight index content, and QuickLook previews.
Use the mdimport and mdls commands to dump full information about all the metadata attributes found for a file, and those indexed by Spotlight.
Two significant indexing errors when processing RTF and image files caused search failures. Display in the Finder is also insufficient to make these xattrs as useful as they could be.
The Eclectic Light Company 