how to make Spotlight fast again

I’ve been wondering ever since Yosemite what Apple had done to mess up Spotlight. It used to be my go-to way to launch apps. Faster than LaunchPad, the Dock or, of course, trawling through the Finder.

But something happened after Mavericks, and things have only being getting worse with Spotlight, right up to and including into Sierra.

Not only has Spotlight been slowed down with ads and ‘suggestions’, but we’ve also even lost the choice of re-ordering search results priority in Spotlight preferences.

I find Spotlight is not only slower than before, but it doesn’t always return the hit I want even when I know what I’m looking for. For a while, I got into the habit of searching using mdfind and locate in the Terminal. Like Spotlight, these use an index based search so can return results very fast. Eventually, I got fed up of that, and wrote my own search tool and added it to FastTasks 2

All this is not good, and if you are seeing the same degradation in Spotlight’s usefulness as I have been, try unchecking the following Preferences and see if it works to get Spotlight back up to a useful speed. With these disabled, I’ve seen a remarkable improvement in Spotlight in macOS 10.11.6.

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