Spotlight not finding Applications

[asus389]

Sometime in the past week I noticed that spotlight on my Mac wasn't finding anything in /Applications. I have a 2017 MBP 13 inch and I have two bootable volumes, one with Mac OS 10.15.7 Catalina and one with Mac OS 13.2 Ventura. Oddly enough, this problem effects both OS when booted.

I've tried all of the normal spotlight troubleshooting that I can think of:

- Added and removed the volume from Spotlight/Privacy in system preferences.
- Ran sudo mdutil -E / at the terminal
- Disabling/enabled spotlight with sudo mdutil -a -i off/sudo mdutil -a -i on
- All of the boxes are checked in the search results tab in the Spotlight preference pane.
- Unchecking and then re-checking /Applications doesn't appear to have done anything.

Does anyone have any suggestions? It's unclear why spotlight would suddenly do this. I'd like to avoid a re-install if possible...

sudo mdutil -sav /
/:

Indexing enabled.

Scan base time: 2023-02-03 13:07:12 +0000 (24067 seconds ago), reasoning: '(null)'

/System/Volumes/Data:

Indexing enabled.

 

[macsound1]

would you mind doing a spotlight search for any built in app and show us a screenshot? Disk utility, terminal, Activity monitor. Nothing too deep

 

[asus389]

Huh, weird. This issue seems to only effect 3rd party apps and Safari? All other pre-install OS X apps come up fine in spotlight.

 

[macsound1]

So in System Preferences, all of these are options are checked, and nothing is excluded?

 

[asus389]

So in System Preferences, all of these are options are checked, and nothing is excluded?

View attachment 2153080 View attachment 2153082

Yep. Weird eh?

 

[asus389]

Hmmm now its doing this?

sudo mdutil -sav /

/:

Error: unexpected indexing state. kMDConfigSearchLevelTransitioning

/System/Volumes/Data:

Error: unexpected indexing state. kMDConfigSearchLevelTransitioning

 

[asus389]

So it looks like mds_stores is repeatedly crashing. This message keeps showing up in the console:

Crashed thread: 5 Dispatch queue: com.apple.metadata.spotlightindex.Utility Index Query scheduler for index at /System/Volumes/Data/private/var/db/Spotlight-V100

 

[jimbocho]

Hey @asus389, have you been able to solve this? I'm experiencing the same problem.

 

[asus389]

No, sadly. I just switched to using the Venutra partition that I had on the same machine. I suspect a re-install would have solved it. No amount of deleting/rebuilding/re-enabling spotlight on my Catalina seemed to fix it.