Comments on: Why is Spotlight a bit dim?

Question: Why is Spotlight a bit dim?

words1 — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 15:06:55 -0800

Spotlight in OS X 10.4 -- doesn't seem to index the actual contents of files and emails. Searching for known terms produces no hits. Mac Mini, 3 mos. old. Any ideas?

By: cillit bang

cillit bang — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 15:10:24 -0800

What kinds of files and what email program are you using? Spotlight needs there to be a special indexer for each filetype, which basically means applications need explicit Spotlight support before it works.

By: pmbuko

pmbuko — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 15:12:50 -0800

If you're not using Mail.app, then chances are your emails are not being indexed. Entourage, for example, lumps all your emails into a single file, and Spotlight doesn't know how to index that file.

By: words1

words1 — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 15:23:41 -0800

It's my wife's machine. She does use Mail, and MS Word for documents. Does Spotlight index Word docs? It would be vewy, vewy stupid not to.

By: schwa

schwa — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 15:31:29 -0800

It does index word docs.

Has anyone added anythign to the list of directories that spotlight ignores?

By: words1

words1 — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 15:41:23 -0800

nope, the "ignore" box is empty.

By: words1

words1 — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 15:42:43 -0800

Could this be some kind of permission issue? How would I check that? (I use XP and Copernic, myself.)

By: cillit bang

cillit bang — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 16:08:42 -0800

If you know how to operate Terminal, cd into a directory with a file that isn't being indexed and type "mdimport -d 3 [filename]". The first thing it will report is the current status of that file. It'll then say what kind of file it thinks it is, then it will attempt to index the file and show the results. You should get some clues on what's happening if you do that.

By: esd

esd — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 16:20:36 -0800

If you can't figure out what's wrong, there's always the brute-force approach: running "sudo mdutil -E /" in Terminal will wipe the index for the main drive, and then Spotlight will re-index everything automatically.

(If you don't know sudo, it's a command that runs whatever comes after it as root. When you run the command above, it'll probably ask you for a password; this should be the password of your wife's account, assuming she's an administrator on the machine.)

By: pokeydonut

pokeydonut — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 20:25:19 -0800

this happened to me a couple times. go into your user folder, go into library, go into preferences, delete com.apple.spotlight.plist and restart. It worked for me every time.