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Level 1

2 points

Spotlight/Find not working!

Okay, currently if I search for "email" using either Find or Spotlight, I get one result—a readme file. Needless to say, I should get much more.

The following solutions I have tried:

—Dragging HD to Spotlight's Preferences' "privacy" tab and away again ("re-indexing" takes all of 20 seconds...)
—Doing "sudo mdutil -E /" in Terminal (as above)
—Deleting Spotlight preferences
–Running Cocktail and Yasu, thereby deleting my cache, running all cron scripts and fixing permissions
—Deleting Spotlight's invisible folder
—Deleting mds crash state invisible file
—Assuring Bluetooth is not next to Spotlight in menu bar

Occasionally, some of these methods would give me a few results, but in no case anything like what I'd expect. The results using the Finder are the same.

I am at my wits' end, and would be very grateful for any solution to this problem!

Thank you in advance,

Lawrence.

Mac OS X (10.4.7)

Mac OS X (10.4.5)

Posted on Jul 17, 2006 5:56 AM

19 replies

Marsdy

Level 1

8 points

Jan 5, 2007 3:19 PM in response to quarterwit

Spotlight hardly ever works here either.

I search for "Music", "Pictures", "Documents" or "Library" and I get NO results. It's just plain broken on my Mac.

And who do I call? My 90 days is up!

I've tried adding and removing my HD from the Privacy pane and also tried deleting and re-building the index with Spotless. I can then do a couple of successful searches before Spolight breaks again.

Nice one Apple. There are far too many reports of problems with Spotlight for it to be user error IMO.

MacBook Pro 17", G5 dual 2.3 Mac OS X (10.4.8) SPOTLIGHT SU*C*KS!!!!!

MacBook Pro 17", G5 dual 2.3 Mac OS X (10.4.6)

Yer_Man

Level 10

162,386 points

Jan 6, 2007 1:24 AM in response to Marsdy

Marsdy

Have you repaired Permissions with Disk Utility?

Also, check your HD for errors, these are common causes of indexing issues.

Regards

TD

Old Toad

Level 10

207,643 points

Jan 6, 2007 9:54 AM in response to Marsdy

Any 3rd party haxies/add-ons installed on your Mac?

Do you Twango?

Jan 6, 2007 10:14 AM in response to Marsdy

What kind of computer do you have?
What kind of hard drive do you have? size, type, etc.

Have you checked if you have any folders with a large amount of single files, like I did in my post above. I had a folder with over 9000+ single images and that was causing Spotlight to choke up. This can also apply when you have too many emails in the Mail application. It seems that the formatting system is not capable of handling a large number of single small files.

I wouldn't go as far as to say that Spotlight *****, because it usually always works for me. Especially now that I cleaned up the 9000+ images. Before that it was a bit frustrating, but it's up and running now, smoothly.

Spotlight/Find not working!