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pete · May 5, 2005, 08:07 AM

I have to be honest. Spotlight has only bee flaky with me. A few times it has worked well and I've loved it, but most of the time it's been more of a problem than an asset. I've had to rebuild the index three times already in three days just to get it to work. Today, I wanted to search for something and I just got the spinning beach ball and 'no results found' when I searched for a word that yesterday gave me hundreds of hits.

Worst of all, I can't even do a regular non-meta data search. I feel crippled. And annoyed that what was to be a quick search turned into a troubleshooting mission and a posting here.

I did a clean install of Tiger and imported my old apps, docs and settings.

What's going on?

Oh, and I rebooted and nothing changed.

pete · May 5, 2005, 08:18 AM

Well, I rebooted a second time and now it seems to be working again. That's great, but I feel it isn't reliable and I count on it working. There should be a way to revert to a normal search if the fancy search fails. Now when it fails, there's nothing you can do.

But the question is WHY is it getting messed up? I noticed several people on Apple's forum with the same problem....

waitingfor970 · May 6, 2005, 07:41 PM

I'm not even getting flakiness. I'm unable to find filenames that I *know* exist -- which may be an indexing issue, although my Tiger installation is now several hours old. Worse still, I can't seem to just do a simple finder window search within the current or active folder (and subfolders). Am I missing something? While the ability to burrow through file contents by keyword is cool (if I can get it to work), the pre-Tiger style of searching was excellent as it was. Don't know if I can do without it. Any suggestions, anyone? Thanks.

waitingfor970 · May 6, 2005, 09:22 PM

Okay, using mdutil to force the indexing seems to be the answer, especially if you've got files on other partitions. The helpful links below were posted in a related thread. I still miss the old, hands-on simple directory search in the Finder window, though...

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php

MPMoriarty · May 6, 2005, 09:52 PM

I had a lot of flaky spotlight behavior. Rebuilding the index would sometimes help, but it would just get flaky again. What finally fixed all the problems for me was when I actually shut down the computer and performed a hard boot of my iBook. After that, Spotlight seemed to fix itself.

waitingfor970 · May 7, 2005, 04:16 PM

Okay, I'm sold. Spotlight rocks. After a bit of prompting from the command line (see post above), the indexing of both partitions on my local drive seemed to take place intermittently over a period of a few hours. Searching now seems to be *very* fast and thorough, just as advertised. Also, my beef about not being able to confine searches to the current folder seems to have been misplaced: it seems that this is spotlight's default behavior when the search is done from within the Finder window (rather than from the menu bar). Now I'll have to see how it manages the archived files on my server...

Big Mac · May 7, 2005, 05:18 PM

Do you think there's any way for a utility to validate or invalidate the indexing so that one will not be left guessing about its status or relying on a corrupted index?

CaptainHaddock · May 8, 2005, 04:30 AM

I've just discovered that Spotlight isn't returning any results for files on my external drive, which holds 75% of my data. The drive was fully indexed by Spotlight too. I'm pretty pissed.