it's been a while since you used macos? apple has completely stopped giving a shit, extremely basic functionality like spotlight and settings search have been completely broken for years now...
spotlight routinely fails to find existing files, newly added programs or system stuff, settings search ranks search results incorrectly, doesn't have fuzzy matching, fails to find stuff, for some languages parts are unfindable in that language at all, parts of the ui are sometimes straight up untranslated...
like, you learn to work around this, mostly by just using raycast, but it's just unacceptable that they've spent BILLIONS on useless ai shit, while stuff THAT HAS WORKED CORRECTLY ALREADY IN THE PAST gets broken and goes unfixed for literal years
Unfortunately on machines doing a lot of software development, the various dependency cache locations need to be excluded from indexing, otherwise Spotlight is essentially doing full text search over millions of lines of code
For me newly installed apps from outside the Appstore are excluded from Spotlight until I manually open them and trigger the 3rd party “untrusted” confirmation dialog. After confirming with Open they show up.
MacOS 26 actually has some really great new features around Spotlight, from actions to clipboard history, and the heretofore-underloved Control Center has been really improved (and is clearly being positioned as the new solution to the plague of ever-increasing menu bar icons). There are improvements to Shortcuts automation. And, for nerds (hi), Terminal finally got 24-bit color and support for Powerline fonts.
I see a lot of "ugh, Tahoe is just the iOS-ification of macOS" on HN, which, on the surface, I get -- the visual changes by and large make things worse, and ironically I think they're actually not as good as the changes on iOS. But the Mac got stuff that the iPad didn't, and there's still a lot you can't do on the iPad that you can on the Mac. I don't think the two are merging any time soon, even if they're becoming more visually similar. (Actually, I don't think the two will ever merge, strictly speaking, but that's another post.)
It's possible that happens to me, and I've not noticed it. I don't add new applications that often, so I can't recall the last time if it showed up immediately or not.
For example let's say I want to go to display settings from search. I enter 'monitor' in search since I forgot how it's called. First results: accessibility, privacy and security, control center, and only 4-th category Displays. It's 8-th line if you count sub-categories.
I usually google where a particular setting is now since I don't use the exact same words and the settings search is very literal.
The search in Settings not working is an issue Apple carried over from iOS (where it was broken for years) into macOS. One of my pet peeves is all the Catalyst apps (like Reminders) that don’t work well with keyboard navigation.
