spotlight not searching word documents

I have stumbled upon something interesting while doing some further research. Start your spotlight entry with "kind:" and specify the type of document, and it will find the string of characters you want in that type of document. So If I search with "kind:word elephant" it will come up with word documents (both .doc and .docx) containing "elephant". You can also search on "kind:doc" and for unknown reasons it will come up with .doc, .docx, pdf, and plain text documents containing "elephant." Search for "kind:docx" and it won't find anything. Search for "kind:rtf elephant" and it comes up with rtf files containing "elephant." Just enter "elephant" (without the "kind:") and spotlight comes up only with files with "elephant" in the name, but that's just the top hits; searching on a less common word turned up files that did not have it in their name. I can't tell if this is a temporary fix, or is something that will really solve the problem. It's definitely not what I would have expected to have to do to find words in files.

Thanks for the extra hints; I hadn't seen your post when I replied to myself. I have documents, other, PDFs and some other things checked in my Spotlight preferences, so that isn't the problem.