I have an app I developed for my own use that has a name very similar to Journal. Since macOS 26 my Spotlight searches (actually using it just as an app launcher) are often picking up Journal instead of my app as first pick. Journal is a macOS built-in app so I see no benign way to forcibly remove it from my macOS 26 install like you could on OS X (or even Classic MacOS) back in the day. I can add Journal to Spotlight’s privacy section, but that does not appear to remove Journal from Spotlight result lists.
Any other ideas (apart form changing my app’s name or changing the way I use Spotlight as my app launcher)?
It’s not learning fast enough. If I enter jo and hit return, it will grab Journal instead because Journal shows up in the results list almost instantaneously whereas my app only shows up ~200 ms later. And of course when I inadvertently launch Journal instead of my app, I’m “teaching” it the wrong thing. My point here is that Spotlight can be used as a very efficient and simple app launcher, but that breaks down if I have to type slowly and wait till it catches up to my typing (and this on an M4 Pro!). If I could just nuke this #*@%$ app from my partition, I’d be golden, but these days we can no longer do that. I was hoping there might be some hiding or exclusion method, but I suppose if nobody here knows it and AIs can’t offer anything useful either, there is perhaps really nothing that can be done. Oh well.
It seems that won’t solve this problem. And I would be surprised if the system will allow the alternative of adding a “.” at the front of the Journal app’s name.
To hide folders or files from the Finder but not Spotlight, use the chflags hiddencommand, with chflags nohidden to unhide them.
To hide folders or files, show hidden items using Command-Shift-. then prefix their name with . (a stop or period), which also hides them from Spotlight, and hides all files within hidden folders too.
Although it will feel like a defeat at the hands of the overlord, perhaps tweaking your app’s name would be the quickest fix?
Bother. Apologies for not noticing that in your post.
I’ve just tested on macOS 15.6. That doesn’t have Journal.app so I can’t test that, but I’ve tried adding Dictionary.app and Safari.app to Spotlight’s Privacy list there, and that does prevent them from showing up in Spotlight results. So… perhaps this undocumented “drag apps in to the Privacy list” feature was broken in macOS 26?
One more idea… if Journal.app is in /System/Applications, perhaps try dragging that in as well / instead?
It’s so weird that things that don’t work for you do work for me. In 26.1, dragging the /Applictaions/Journal.app to Privacy in Spotlight settings definitely prevents it from showing up. Removing it from privacy and it immediately shows up again when I start typing “jou”.
Do you have a paired iPhone? If so, is it possible that Spotlight is instead finding the iPhone’s Journal app when you search? There is a setting to turn off results from iPhone apps in settings.
Bad phrasing on my part. I meant to say: drag in /Systems/Applications/Journal.app. In case Spotlight is distinguishing between that and the link to it from /Applications.
Finally got it to work. Removed the Journal entry from Spotlight Privacy again. Rebooted. After the reboot added it again to Privacy list. Still nothing. Rebooted again. After that 2nd reboot, now Journal no longer shows up in Spotlight search lists.
Fun fact: tried that exact same procedure except for logging out and back in instead of rebooting and it didn’t work. The reboots were required to get this to work. Go figure.
