Check Spotlight progress?

"indexing" is not a special value here. All you need is the full results pane, so "bob" or "red banana" would also do the job. If you don't see a progress/activity bar (as you don't in your screenshot), then Spotlight indexing is done.

As before in other OSX's you add the drive that you want to index to the exclusion list and then highlight and hit the minus button to remove that same drive to start the indexing of that drive. If you then click on spotlight magnifying glass on top bar menu and type indexing in and hit return you will then see the indexing progress. Yes, Apple in their wisdom are making everything harder to see and more clicks and typing to see it. They call it progress. I call it unhelpful and typical of Apple's ongoing commitment to creating unnecessary confusion and making ordinary tasks more longwinded and time consuming. Nothing is ever explained and we the customers have to work everything out for ourselves.

Just as an addition; I tried Indexing today and then tried the advice that someone had offered me, which was to type in any letter into the Spotlight search in order for it to show that it was indeed Indexing and what came up was e.g. iBooks if I put a B in etc., so in the end I had to put Indexing in to see that it was in fact indexing. The only thing that I did differently today was to close the dialogue box after following the normal procedure to Index before looking to see if it was Indexing. As I said before, removing the automatic indexing progress bar in El Capitan from Spotlight is not helpful..

To type "indexing" in the Spotlight window worked for me before. But now it stopped working. I always get Evernote notes containing "indexing". Any idea?