Spotlight not finding applications like iDVD?

A number of ways to rebuild it.
Simplest is to open Spotlight preference pane.
Drag your hard drive into the Privacy tab.
Quit.
Come back, remove your drive from Privacy tab.
Quit.
Let SL completely finish rebuilding the index.

Scott

Spotlight is running all the time and wont stop indexing and this is causing snow leopard to hang and slow down all other applications I hope apple puts a fix out for this quick.

This issue has nothing to do with the OP's. Threadjacking is frowned upon. Start your own thread.

I encountered your same problem. Spotlight would not find ANY of my apps in /Applications.
Ignoring and then un-ignoring /Applications did NOT work for me.
Neither did a re-install.

So, here is the fix that worked for me....

Open Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal.app
Type the following, if running Leopard:

sudo mdimport /Applications

if running Snow Leopard:

sudo arch -i386 mdimport /Applications

Wait for about a minute or two. Once you get the command prompt back, you should find your apps under Spotlight.

The arch -i386 part of the Snow Leopard command allows 32-bit plug-ins to work correctly.

Good luck

Thanks for that; however, the OP and the list are Snow Leopard, so non-SL stuff isn't needed. Hopefully, that fixes the issue, but I've never had to invoke it and Spotlight finds all applications in /Applications.

Another simpler issue is - have you selected Applications from the Search Results tab?

Did you try my first suggestion I posted?

Having the same problem -- Spotlight not finding any apps despite "Applications" being checked in Spotlight prefs. I saw it occasionally pre-Snow Leopard, and am sad to see that something so basic and essential hasn't been fixed in a release billed as the bug-fix package to end all bug-fix packages.

alangsam wrote:
i wish it were that easy. everything is selected. i suspect the command that was recommended is the way to go however i cant get the command to execute...

Leave the sudo off of the front of the command. sudo is used to run commands as root from a non root account, hence the error you're seeing.
It should work and fix the problem then.

W.

Open Terminal and type something such as:
mdimport /Applications


or mdimport /FOLDER THAT IS NOT BEING INDEXED BY SPOTLIGHT/

Running arch -i386 mdimport /Applications from Terminal resolved the issue for me.