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Um, yeah, it is all my fault. Spotlight to suck dead goats at me but lately it works just dandy. I guess my Mac somehow stole all the Spotlight goodgood juice from yours'. I don't feel bad about that because it is good for me but it helps me deal with the joy by rubbing it in your faces. I'm a prick, you see.



If it helps, you can clear up some Spotlight wonkiness by deleting the database - much like clearing caches. I know the terminal is bad mojo but the following command will clean things up:

sudo rm -rf /.Spotligtht-V100

Last edited by test (2007-01-18 9:13 pm)

Maybe I'm using spotlight differently, but i type in what i'm looking for and it comes up with no issues. Whether it be an e-mail, text file or picture, i always get what i'm looking for. I'm kind of confused as to what everyone is missing.

Avari wrote:

Maybe I'm using spotlight differently, but i type in what i'm looking for and it comes up with no issues. Whether it be an e-mail, text file or picture, i always get what i'm looking for. I'm kind of confused as to what everyone is missing.

You're not using it differently; you just don't have very many files on your system. 

The problem is twofold.  First, Spotlight doesn't let you narrow your search options at all, which especially sucks if you install Xcode because then you get a sh** load of header files, cpp files, licenses, manuals etc...  For users who don't have many files on their systems, spotlight's inflexibility is a non-issue.

Secondly, spotlight simply doesn't always work right, and fixing it periodically is a nusence.  Apparently, spotlight's more susceptible to corruption on systems with a lot of files.

There's many more shortcomings as well (such as the inability to search hidden files or system files) but the two I've outlined are the biggest offenders.

Last edited by Mr. T (2007-01-18 11:43 pm)

Exactly Mr T.

The part that truly blows my mind is how there's no way (that is obvious to me) to quickly find where the files spotlight finds are located. With my backups, I'll find the same file or email 5 times over.

I purchased spotless and deleted indexes on all my drives, and disabled indexing, but left spotlight running. Finder searches seem to be back to normal now. If you type anything into spotlight, it comes up with no results. So it finally has taken it's usefulness out of the negative and has risen to zero - right where I want it.

Searches on our shared network volume is painfully slow, but it will finally give me results - it sounds like EasyFind may aid me in that.

If they want to tout the Mac as being a great business machine, they need an off button on spotlight. 60,000 emails in Entourage, 70% of your terabyte of storage filled, an 80gig itunes library, a 45gig iPhoto library and a 2TB network volume is instant death to spotlight. For my Mom, it works great - she loves it.

Any-who, hopefully my spotless fix will remain working and this post will help others. The idea of paying to disable portions of my OS to make it usable seems completely insane to me.

spotlight needs a serious fixing.  when I access spotlight from the menu bar it can't seem to find what I'm looking for, but if I open a finder window and type my search there it finds it right away. 

as noted before spotlight needs a way to instantly tell me where a file is located.  instead of having to "get info" on each file.

You can hold your mouse over the file and it'll pop a tooltip containing the file's path or you can press command-return to show it in Finder.

It can help to delete the .Spotlight-V100 whatever it is database and let the os rebuild it. It cures ailments. (it's a hidden dir. located at the root of the boot volume)

I make "images" to support new installs of Macs, and before I create the image I delete the spotlight database. This forces each mac to have a new database that tends to actually work when I "migrate" a user that has been active on another Mac. I have had users I have moved to a new machine not find a single document because for whatever reason Spotlight decided not to index the "migrated" user.

I have had very few issues finding my data and I have alot, and multiple drives. This is with middle of word searches and the lot.

However, I do agree it can definitely stand some tweaks, I don't care for the Spotlight window, and that it functions different than the finder spotlight window is my pet peeve with it. I shouldn't have to click an info icon or hover I may need the path elsewhere, when I select the file it should show the path and persist in showing the path.