New app tests Spotlight indexing and search of local files across 15 test files and two search methods. This should provide valuable clues for diagnosis.
Spotlight
How to find images containing objects recognised by Visual Look Up, and text by Live Text, using Spotlight, mdfind and in an app.
macOS gained Live Text and Visual Look Up when Apple declared its intent to check our images. Both are used in Spotlight’s indexes, but their function seems unreliable and highly variable.
Looks at how Spotlight adds a batch of new files to its volume indexes, and how it handles and answers queries.
A meta-search for Apple’s patents on search, and turning the incessant log chatter of RunningBoard to our advantage in following uninstrumented apps.
Supported by some of the many patents awarded to Apple’s engineers, a year-by-year account of the development of Spotlight from 1994 to 2019.
Apple’s several patents cast new light on how Spotlight indexes the metadata and contents of local files, and why mds and other processes need to reindex periodically.
Productivity improvements with metadata editing and cataloguing, fun with Unicode lookalikes, and measuring the performance of storage. All now for Big Sur to Tahoe.
As the web exploded in size, early curated directories were replaced by search engines. These were revolutionised by Google’s PageRank for popularity, and are now being replaced by AI overviews.
How a long-deprecated extended attribute can stop files such as images from being found in Spotlight search, and how to fix it.
The Eclectic Light Company 