Google’s official client for Mac OS, “Backup and Sync” is no more. It has been replaced by “Google Drive” now. One problem is that the new approach exposes files as a Network Drive, which, for some reason, isn’t indexed by Spotlight. So, you can no longer search for the Google Drive files via Spotlight unless you re-enable the indexing.

After jumping through multiple non-working solutions, I found one that enables indexing on Google Drive.

Bash
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# Enable Google Drive indexing and wait for a few minutes for the files to be indexed
$ sudo mdutil -i on /Volumes/GoogleDrive/
# Confirm that indexing is enabled
$ sudo mdutil -a -i on