How Spotlight works, Core and global Spotlight, importing failure, exclusions from indexing, re-indexing, excessive re-indexing, failure to find, iCloud Drive and network shares.
Spotlight
Try searching for something you know is in a file in ~/Library/Preference and you’re unlikely to get any success. This explains how, and why you can’t alter that.
You use Spotlight to search for something you’re sure is there, but it can’t find it. Here are some methods to discover why that search failed.
Why Spotlight can now take a long time building and updating its volume indexes. Understand when forcing them to be rebuilt is a good idea, and when it isn’t.
Are you worried about your Mac maxing out its E cores after starting up in Sequoia? There may be nothing wrong about this, as explained here.
A brief reference to excluding items from being backed up, from Spotlight indexing their contents, and for them to be copied up to iCloud Drive.
How to prefix a file or folder name with a . to hide it, how to use chflags, and how they differ. And what are all those .DS_Store and ._ files doing?
All you need to know about the main services in iCloud, the limits imposed on them by Apple, and how access to them can be controlled.
When you start your Mac up, the fans blow full on, and you see CGPDFServices taking lots of CPU %. Is this malware? No, but it’s new in Sonoma.
Searching the text content of PDF documents often doesn’t work well, sometimes not at all. And recovering what you can see is text can also fail miserably.
