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[HPBEME]

I have always thought MC spotlight is fantastic idea, but I have had a recurring issue ever since it was introduced a couple years ago.

Sometimes MC will load the artist data within a couple seconds, but way too often it takes over 30 seconds to a minute.  In addition, instead of showing every album by an artist, it shows only what I have in my personal collection. The behavior change always seems to occur right after an update.  Since I don't use Spotlight regularly due to this issue, I'm not positive if the good/bad behavior toggles with every update, but I have noticed more than once that if it was working correctly (i.e., loads artist data fast and shows every album by a given artist), right after I apply a new MC update, the undesired behavior returns.

Does anybody else experience this?  If not, does anybody have any idea as to what might cause it?  I do use VPN which can certainly be a culprit at times.  That said, when spotlight is working well, it seems to work well whether VPN is on or off.  Same is true if Spotlight is working poorly - VPN status is irrelevant. The behavior does not improve when I turn it off.

I would love to use this great MC feature, but as it is, it is just not usable as the poor/slow behavior seems to be more common than Spotlight performing well - at least when I decide to check on it. Any thoughts for solutions would be greatly appreciated.

[HPBEME]

I let this post marinate for a few days, but still no response.  Bumping it myself to get it back near the top (at least for a couple hours).  If no other users are experiencing this issue or similar, I am hoping the developers at least have some insight or suggestions.

[JimH]

The data comes from Google, and the VPN may be blacklisted by them.  Try without it.

[HPBEME]

Well, as I noted in the 1st post:

I do use VPN which can certainly be a culprit at times.  That said, when spotlight is working well, it seems to work well whether VPN is on or off.  Same is true if Spotlight is working poorly - VPN status is irrelevant. The behavior does not improve when I turn it off.

In addition, I use google for gmail and just generally with the VPN on all the time, with no issue.

[JimH]

Whatever the reason, Spotlight is unable to reach Google.

It may also be possible that there is no Google entry for the artist.  You could check that from a browser.

[EnglishTiger]

Over the last couple of months there are times when Wikipedia pages load very slowly even when accessing them from within Wikipedia.
This may just be a coincidence but the tardy loading of Wikipedia Pages started happening around the time MS let Co-Pilot escape.

[HPBEME]

Thanks Jim and ET for your replies.  I have since done a further investigation on the VPN front. 

Turning off VPN for poorly behaving websites always fixes them, but that does not work for MC.  For whatever reason, I thought that maybe if I closed the browser windows too, maybe that would work… and voilà, it did!  So I can now get MC spotlight to work (load artist data in under two seconds typically), but at the expense of having to turn off VPN and close all browser windows first, and keeping VPN off.  I'm not sure why the VPN tentacles run deeper for MC than problematic websites, but applying this "fix" has consistently "worked".
 
That said, keeping VPN off is not a viable solution for me, as I prefer to keep my VPN always active (only turning it off briefly to log into specific problematic sites). 

If J River were to switch to Duck Duck Go as their default search engine, perhaps that might resolve this issue without me having to turn off VPN and close browser windows?  If that does work, an additional huge benefit would be one less path for Google to insert their ubiquitous and nefarious hooks.  I have been using Duck Duck Go (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo) as my default search engine for a decade at least, and it's just as fast as Google without all the spying. Any thoughts about that?