macOS High Sierra, Messages won't search at all I just got a new 2018 Macbook Pro, so I'm in the process of migrating from my 2013 MBP to the new one.  I don't trust the Migration Assistant due to numerous bad past experiences, so I do this kind of thing manually.

To move my Messages content over, I copied the entire ~/Library/Messages/ directory over to the new machine, and Messages generally seems to work fine - all my messages are there, Text Forwarding from my phone works, etc.  The one thing that doesn't work, is search.  I can't search for anything at all, no matter what it is.  100% of attempted searches results in "No Results Found".

Is this a Spotlight issue?  Is there some trick to make Messages' content searchable?
I finally got a solution for this in the Apple forums.  Still not sure why it worked but, here's what was suggested:


  In Sys Prefs>Spotlight>Search Results, uncheck "Mail &amp; Messages" (and leave it unchecked), then
  add your drive to Spotlight's exclusion pane, wait, then remove the
  drive from the exclusion pane, wait for Spotlight to rebuild it's
  index.


I had to leave the machine overnight but this morning, Messages search works again.