Spotlight - How to Remove Web Search from Results

[BiochMiker]

Bump.

Not fixed in 12.5. Still no reasonable solution?

3.06 Gigabytes of updates and no responsiveness to this issue. Frustrating.

 

[anaphylactic_phalynx]

Yup c'mon Apple. I remember when Steve Jobs showed off the new Spotlight and emphasized it would be a new way to search YOUR MAC for whatever document you were looking for. Apple quietly phased in embedded web searching here, with the option to disable going away mid-Monterey, I think. Now I have to scroll down past any number of things, including App Store offers (you're advertising to me on my personal device now!?), trending Safari searches I don't care about, and links to various Apple-related product searches in order to access the results I'm looking for - a very un-Steve set of hurdles that annoys the f out of me. Wouldn't be surprised if Apple gets $ to highlight certain search results above others, like Google does.

 

[BiochMiker]

Still not fixed in 12.5.1, as far as I can tell.

 

[iFunction]

Hi guys, I was struggling with this also, and fiddling around, I seem to have red myself of browser searches. In spotlight preferences, I unchecked these three "Bookmarks & History", "Other", and "Siri Suggestions" and now all I get from firefox, is an offer to search the web, all other results finally just come from my own computer. Hope this helps someone else with this nightmare. I'm on the latest OS and update at tinme of writing, so that's MacOS Monterey Version 12.6

 

[BiochMiker]

Not fixed in Ventura. So frustrating. But now the system settings are in a different format which also makes it harder to find the setting you want to adjust! Yay! Why can't they add "web search" to the search results so that we can simply unselect it? WHY?

 

[BiochMiker]

Hi guys, I was struggling with this also, and fiddling around, I seem to have red myself of browser searches. In spotlight preferences, I unchecked these three "Bookmarks & History", "Other", and "Siri Suggestions" and now all I get from firefox, is an offer to search the web, all other results finally just come from my own computer. Hope this helps someone else with this nightmare. I'm on the latest OS and update at tinme of writing, so that's MacOS Monterey Version 12.6

I saw your post after I posted mine (I'm now running Ventura). I already had the other two unchecked so I also unchecked "Other". It didn't help me.

 

[auxbuss]

I eventually had to upgrade to Monterey for "reasons", and so now have to deal with this monstrosity. It really does reduce the utility of Spotlight to "Launch Application" and almost nothing else – I find the mini-calculator useful occasionally. Such a shame, because Spotlight was so useful through to Catalina.

And they still haven't fixed the "Developer" section showing in all cases. Just give us the option to switch it off for heaven's sake.

The overall utility is so wrong, so low, it has surely been done on purpose and for a reason, but I've no idea what that might be. Perhaps time for Alfred...

(I just entered "user" to go to "Users and Groups" and got a search for "user-defined classes". How can anyone get this so wrong?)

 

[snortpig]

Still no way to remove or downlink web searches (or even disable "Suggestions") in Spotlight as of Sonoma 14.2.1

 

[FriedEngineer]

Still no way to remove or downlink web searches (or even disable "Suggestions") in Spotlight as of Sonoma 14.2.1

Yep. I more or less gave up on Spotlight and have been using Raycast. I’ve found it to be much more customizable for my needs. Alfred would be another alternative.

 

[jboyzh]

Still the same on Sonoma 14.3. I wonder if this is fixed on Vision Pro, after all?