[mac freak]

I always bother to let my system do it, and it's very time-consuming, so does anyone have a clue as to what it actually does?

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Be Happy.

[Don Foy]

Prepare for smart-alek reply:

It indexes your hard drive.

Which is actually what it does. It enables you to search for content of those files in Sherlock. Back when I used OS 9, I let it index once a week. I never used it, however. I haven't decided what to do in OS X yet.

[Cipher13]

Don't bother, its just not that useful
It indexes all types of files... I think you can choose to index certain files (contextual menu, go to 'index'?) or something like that...
And also, the indexes use a fair bit of HD space...

Cipher13

[jeffhot]

Yeah, the point is to be able to search beyond file names, like in their descriptions or content.

But the superlong time it takes to index and the huge file it creates are hardly worth it. Unless, I suppose, that you have millions of really old files that you can't remember. what was that thing I had that was about something else but mentioned the phrase "the bee's knees"? who cares.

I had a 100 Meg index that I hadn't updated in about a year. I tried to do it, and it told me it would take 50 hours.