File searches always fail
This is a persistent problem for me. I'll search for a file and the search will turn up nothing, even though the file is definitely there. This issue has cost me many hours of manually searching through my files. It happened on my old Intel MacPro, and it happens on my new M4 Mac Studio that I just recently bought. It can happen when I'm searching my internal system drive, or one of my external drives. It can happen with file name searches, content searches, file type searches, and on and on... The other day I did a search for all movie files on an external drive with hundreds of video files, and it didn't turn up a single one.
Yes, I know that searches can sometimes take a while, but I can see that it's not actually working; there's no spinning wheel -- it's just says "0 items" almost immediately. And I also know that there are certain folders that it won't search unless you explicitly tell it to, but this is not that. I've included a few screenshots so you can see the kind of failures I've been having. On the left is my search attempt, and on the right you can see the file(s) that my search should have turned up, but didn't.
I assume I can't be the only person having this issue, right? Is there a known fix, or is there maybe a 3rd party app that can help with this? It's becoming such a nuisance. Here are my current system specs, but this has happened on multiple machines and operating systems.
Mac Studio M4
macOS Tahoe 26.3.1