Solved: Re: Mac Spotlight not indexing Google Drive files ... - Page 9

BoI_Admin · 08-19-2021 09:27 AM

I got an increasing amount of feedbacks in our organization about a particular issue with the Google Drive for Desktop app:

It seems that on Mac, the Spotlight is not indexing the files that are in the Google Drive desktop folder...
I looked into it and tried all the recommended solutions from these sources but no result:

Has anybody had the same issue and is there some clear solution?

colkurtz_78

So there have been a lot of false starts at my end, following steps on this forum, and some of the ALMOST working, but even when it did, speed was always a deal breaker. Happy to share that here in Jakarta, Indonesia, Google Drive version 69.0.0.0 update changed the game dramaticaly: It announced it was moving the Google Drive folder locally from Favourites - always a pain - to Locations. I have just tried searches and files are showing up in Search that live in GD (streamed) - just as fast as local files!

I will literally have to go back and re-teach myself to be as fast with GD efficiency, but that's a price I'm willing to pay to get my 15% speeed back - that has been missing for 1.8 years! The Google/Apple "Deciders" have finally made it work, I'm happy.

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jim_plantman

This has been going on for so long I think it's time for my team to quit google's 'business' products.

Searching Drive on a mac is just too unreliable and painful to be useful.

jwein

Honestly, same situation here. For the most part, I really enjoy Google products but this has resulted in such a hit to productivity that we've begun the process of researching the switch to Microsoft or another platform. The most disappointing thing is the lack of any sort of response to issues like this.

Tom_Sch

I have to agree. Lack of communication is the worst thing. Regarding the Spotlight integration. It is not working and I set a keyboard shortcut for the Google Drive search wich works great and this is not that bad. But in general Google needs to be more proactive when it comes to answer feedback from their users. We all pay a lot of money for their services and a good and working support is essential.

Marcel_MGR

KrisPenguin

ISSUE SOLVED! You can now enable the feature within the google drive settings.

colkurtz_78

Where are these settings? My Google Drive preferences look different... but I have yet to upgrade to latest version of Monterey (12.6). Did these appear after latest OS update?

kvgorham

colkurtz

Click on Google Drive preferences -- then on the gear icon again for settings.

colkurtz_78

@kvgorham - I love you! Thanks for taking time to share that - I missed the second gear icon inside Preferences. IT WORKS! Almost a year to the day I upgraded my Mac and had to start with Monterey - IT WORKS! If you're listening Google, I thank you, too, for getting around to addressing this pain in all our sides.

I also want to note that from Google Ads to Workspace "upgrades" you (Alphabet/Google) have been knocking loudly on my business's door lately. The service has not be outstanding and I am getting a whif of fear. I can only surmise that by finally addressing the hundreds of complaints on this forum someone at your end might have realised you can't upsell an unhappy customer. The fix is appreciated, but I would really like to have the 11-months of reduced productivity back.

I don't say that flippantly, either. I had optimised workflow of my small team of 15 digital agency employees around Google Drive, despite pushback from corporate clients who always wanted to use OneDrive, etc. and we were a well-oiled machine, searching in Finder for files across drives and Google Drive had been working for us as a team for years. When some of us were forced onto Monetery in October 2021 I estimate that daily time spent finding files when up by around 15-minutes per day, not counting times when we gave up with furstration at the browser interace. That's 222 business days times 15-minutes so 55.5 hours. Well over a week of lost productivity for the four, then five, then seven of us who were pushed onto Monterey. I can't quantify the total cost to my business and I don't want to, but it makes me feel sick to my stomach, we are not a big company. But a free year of the Workspace bells and whistles you keep trying to sell me would be nice. Or $1,000 bucks of Google Ad budget would be appreciated. Some kind of recompense for everyone on this thread would go a long way to restoring your brand in my eyes.

The above rough calculation does not include the hours I spent, as Managing Director and Owner of www.twomc.com trying to figure out how to get back to the lithe file sharing my team enjoyed prior to this issue emerging. No one from your side had any answers.

So, my real THANK YOU goes out to everyone on this thread. You kept me sane, you helped me explore solutions and it was @kvgorham - not a Google rep - who eventually shared the solution. Best online forum experience of my life (I'm only 44 but grew up with dial-up message boards.) I know a lot of you here are also SME owners or individual professionals yourselves, and had put your faith in Google Drive as a business tool after much consideration, probably around 2015-2016 if you are like me. Thank you all for digging, for sharing and helping me keep my sanity by providing a sense of community and voice. I hope this fix works for everyone and, if you're listening Google, pull your socks up. Communicating the issue, even, "We are working on it, sorry." would have been a step up from radio silence. Lost opportunity to endure us to your brand.

dmitriy_romanyu

@colkurtz_78 Could you clarify in more details what is works?

search in finder ?
search in spotlight ?
search in "save as" or "print to" menu ?

Thank you!

colkurtz_78

All of the above but have not tried print, printer has been down and out for a week.

kvgorham

So happy it works for you. It DOES NOT work for me. I share the pain of lost productivity.

colkurtz_78

Replying to my own post of "Success" here - it was a false start, just got excited things were showing up in search but never go the speed to make it useful like pre-2021. NOW it's back with bells on, baby!

dmitriy_romanyu

This setting was available like a month ago.. but it doesn't work as it should.

1. search works only in finder ( but with significant delay)

2. search from spotlight doesn't work

3. search from "save as" menu doesn't work ( the most painful issue for me )

I notices that the new release of Google Drive Desktop was rolled out yesterday ( v64 ). I'm still on v63. Waiting for update. Maybe there are some improvements

kvgorham

Yes the search option was available and I opted for it. I am on version 63.0.5.0 google drive and Monterey ver 12.5.1

1. search does NOT work in finder at all

2. search does NOT work from spotlight

3. search from "save as" or "print to" does NOT work either

nidgemo

You can click that button all you want (I have) and it STILL doesn't work.

GregW

Um, not so good for me. Can you search in the Finder Search field for file contents? Example... search for a known string contained in a PDF or Google Docs file. Do it in Google Drive browser and then again in Mac Finder. My Drive in Browser works perfectly and finder search does not find any contents of any file -- only file and folder names.

colkurtz_78

I just tried again and found that if I A) tell Finder to search in Google Drive and B) include a general search term before a contextual one (Client Name) + (Specific Name in a client contract) it does pull it up.

cryptochrome

While searching for filenames *can* work (depending on macOS version and Drive version), what is not working and likely won't ever work is indexed searching (e. g. searching for text strings inside of documents).

However, this is not a Google issue. We can thank Apple for this. It's happening across all similar storage apps like Box and Dropbox as well. Apple's push to remove kernel extensions from the OS and forcing developers onto the new File Provider API means that all developers are limited to what Apple is allowing them to do. Searching remote indexes is not part of that API, and indexing locally would defeat the purpose of file streaming (in Apple's eyes).

So unless Apple makes significant changes to the File Provider API, don't get your hopes up.

ThomasB

I would be happy if I could search text strings within files that are mirrored on my computer (i.e. the file content is stored on my drive), but are in the Box or Google virtual drives. Is the Apple File Provide API going to enable that?

cryptochrome

Yes, that actually works. If you instruct your Drive client (or Box, or Dropbox or whatever you use) to sync the files locally, Spotlight will index those files like any other local file. It just doesn't work on streamed files.

One caveat though: This only works on "real" files, not on Google Docs, Sheets, Slides etc. - Drive only downloads shortcuts to those - which is logical, if you think about it.

nidgemo

Not true. At all. ALL my files are stored locally, set to be "available offline" and search does not function, at all.

GregW

Excellent intel. Thanks for it. This all worked perfectly a year ago! It was part of my everyday workflow maybe 60 to 80 times each day. Really feeling crippled and pissed off.

colkurtz_78

@GregW I feel you. It's not the same as it once was, it's slower, but many of the features are there again. To @cryptochrome 's comments above, most of the files I use on a regular basis I've always opted for "Available Offline" status which means search is faster and (if not a Google Doc) allows for indexed searching.

I apologize if my rant above on "success" got people too excited when it's still not 100%. The main feature I wanted back was to just be able to A) Search for file names across my local and Google Drive files and B) Be able to re-organise things with 3-4 Finder windows open, dragging and dropping. To a large extent, this is now possble. I did note that in some cases I cannot open Google Sheets documents from the Finder, though. A double click yields nothing. I need to look it up in the browser and open from there (lame).

It seems the struggle is still real, and not yet resolved. My task force for finding an alternate will not yet be broken up and I will continue to hold my breath for the full functionality we all enjoyed a year ago. @Google PULL YOUR SOCKS UP!

dcampagna

It's okay, I've been fooled before, also. Right now I have about 900 GB in Google Drive. Only about 1% is actually on my computer, all the rest is streaming. I can get results out of that 1%, but the other 99% is invisible. (Edit: that's GB not MB!)

GregW

Exactly! Between my four Google workspace accounts, I have almost 900 GB of files. No chance I'm storing those locally! This whole thing is absolutely maddening (since it worked perfectly a year ago)!

cryptochrome

Google can pull up their socks all they want, but it is actually Apple's fault. See my previous post. Apple has severely restricted what cloud storage apps can do on macOS. This is the result.

dcampagna

I DO NOT CARE who's fault it is. All I know is I pay for storage and a service, and right now the service is broken. This problem between Google and Apple has nothing to do with us. I have no sympathy for a company who continues to take my money while blatantly selling a broken product to new customers. Why hasn't Google sent us all a refund for their broken software? Nobody's holding their breath. This is a class-action lawsuit in the making.

dmitriy_romanyu

Unfortunately, most of corporate users are on windows. So Google maybe don’t care so much about our pain ).

btw, few years ago, when I used windows, search in Google drive wasn’t available on that platform. That was one of the reasons to switch to Mac.. And now - deja vu )

cryptochrome

@dcampagna wrote:
I DO NOT CARE

Unfortunately, things aren't that simple. You can demand things from Google all you want, and you are entitled to do so, but one has to realize why things are broken. If you buy a Tesla and your city doesn't provide enough charging stations for you to charge your car, you wouldn't and couldn't blame Tesla for that, right?

This is a similar situation. Apple has removed kernel extensions from macOS and the only way for storage service providers to implement the features you want are provided by a new Apple API that simply does not offer that functionality. There is just no way around it. Developers are forced to do it the Apple way. Google can't just magically change macOS.

dcampagna

@cryptochrome I've been following this thread for thirteen months and posting on it for nine. I know exactly what's wrong with the Google-Apple API issues and and again, I DON'T CARE.

@cryptochrome wrote:
Unfortunately, things aren't that simple. You can demand things from Google all you want, and you are entitled to do so, but one has to realize why things are broken. If you buy a Tesla and your city doesn't provide enough charging stations for you to charge your car, you wouldn't and couldn't blame Tesla for that, right?

That's an absolutely terrible analogy. The software already worked properly! It was fully integrated with Spotlight and then broke. To rephrase your example:

I paid for a Tesla and was charging it every day, whenever I wanted, for a few years. Life was great. Then suddenly, all the chargers in my city shut off without any warning at all. For several months I, and thousands of other drivers, didn't get a single email, memo or blog post from Tesla explaining why the chargers didn't work any more. Some of us (like myself) were told by customer service our pumps never worked in the first place, and we didn't know any better! Finally Tesla says - by proxy, no less - "listen, it's not our fault the pumps don't work. The company that makes the pumps changed their software. But we have a workaround! Charge your car at our new pumps 100 miles away in Teslatown! They work great! But don't blame us, it's the other company's fault!" I would say the same thing to Tesla: I DON'T CARE.

And for your information, I have used the Google Search function. But like (probably) 99% of Mac users, I don't have every single one of my files on Drive. Some are on my MacBook, locally. Sometimes I have two versions, a draft stored locally and a final copy on Drive, which I share. What if I want to see both copies, so I can compare them? Every single time I'm searching for a lost file, I have to do two searches, one in Spotlight for my Mac, and then a second search on Google. That's not a solution, that's extra work! Is it better than zero solution? Yes. Will Google issue me or any of us a credit? Will they even bother to send an email apology? Ha, that's laughable.

colkurtz_78

More like drive backwards to Teslatown, lol. The Chrome Google Drive is good in a punch but it's not built for speed, and like you say, as a Mac user I want a single window to search all my drive locations. Sorry to see it's not working for everyone - maybe of note: I'm in Asia. I'm actually Canadian but it started working for me in Jakarta, Indonesia. Currently in Singapore on business and it is working, albeit not like it used to. The features I need for biz are there, though. Hope it comes to life for everyone else here, too. It might be worth sharing your country location and rig specs to see if there's a pattern.

cryptochrome

@dcampagna wrote:
The software already worked properly! It was fully integrated with Spotlight and then broke

Right, and it broke for one reason: Apple removed kernel extensions from macOS and forced all developer to switch to the File Provider API. The Google Drive version that actually uses it is still rolling out (very slowly). Once you have that, Spotlight will be able to index your Google Drive again, if you mark you files as "available offline".

Here you can find out whether you are using the new File Provider API version of Google Drive or the old version (which is now broken because Apple removed the kernel extensions necessary to integrate with Spotlight from macOS):

https://support.google.com/drive/answer/12178485?hl=en

dcampagna

@cryptochrome wrote:

Right, and it broke for one reason: Apple removed kernel extensions from macOS and forced all developer to switch to the File Provider API.

And yet -- Google still charges me for it. It's not like this came out of the blue; Google has early developer versions just like everyone else --- I don't have any problems with my Dropbox, Syncplicity and OneDrive cloud accounts.

@cryptochrome wrote:
Spotlight will be able to index your Google Drive again, if you mark you files as "available offline".

Don't pass that off as something Google did. We've been able search local files the entire time because they are local. The whole point of paying for a cloud service is that the files are in the cloud! If I had them on my computer, why would I be paying for it?

nidgemo

We have categorically NOT been able to search local files the entire time. My files are set to "available offline" they are stored on my machine and STILL (on v66) remain completely unsearchable.

kvgorham

Today I opened my computer to drive messages from google.

(Drive Ver 66.0.3.0 MacOS 12.6)

Learn more took me to

https://support.google.com/drive/answer/12178485#zippy=%2Cwhy-am-i-being-asked-to-enable-google-driv...

I verified that drive is connected to finder...

Confirm if you're using File Provider

If you received a notification from Drive for desktop with a “Learn more” link that brought you here, you are using the feature. To confirm:

Open Drive for desktop.
Click Settings Preferences.
At the top right, click Settings .
Under “Google Drive streaming location,” make sure you see a notification that says “Folder location is controlled by macOS.”

12 and 1/2 months later... I can finally search files in finder and spotlight and get results!!!!!!!!! Was doubtful this day would come. Hooray!

dcampagna

>From that same post:
"Spotlight search will only search a subset of your Drive corpus including
any downloaded files. To search your full Drive corpus, use the Drive for
desktop search tool or the Drive website."
The only files you can search are ones you download. Anything in the Cloud
is still hidden.

bryonm

Not in my case. I am able to search on and offline files.

kvgorham

I totally agree @dcampagna. If the product doesn't function and google offers it. Get it working. Stop pointing fingers.

cryptochrome

They are not pointing fingers, though. They never once blamed Apple for it. I did 🙂

nidgemo

Totally. If they CAN'T make it work on apple, then refund everyone, apoligise and stop selling the service to mac users at all (or at least be clear and say "you can use this, but you can't search for files any more")

If they CAN fix it - then stop charging all mac users until it's fixed, and fix it NOW!

Mac Spotlight not indexing Google Drive files in desktop

Confirm if you're using File Provider