iOS has this problem as well. You search for a setting in the Settings app. It’ll say “doesn’t exist” (or whatever) while it’s looking for something extremely obvious (like “software update”) instead of just showing a processing icon.

Then when it does show the results, they’re usually in some terribly unhelpful order. It took me ages to try and go through the CUJ of “this app isn’t sending me notifications because I turned them off now I want them back on”

Just yesterday I was trying to find a file in Finder, using the search, and it could not find it even though I was just one directory up from the directory it was sitting in. It made no sense to me at all. Reading these stories, it’s clicking for me.

It’s a relief to hear this is common. I thought this was user error or a consequence of frequently filling up the internal SSD thus nuking the index.

Just adding a "me too" here, Spotlight used to be incredible. Now it's basically only good if you wait 5-10 seconds... sometimes.

I gave up on it because of this and installed Raycast which seems a lot more reliable. I used Spotlight effectively as my launcher for apps/settings, and have the Dock completely hidden and Spotlight set to hide everything else. But when it can't even do that consistently, I have no idea how!