macosspotlight
If I type any of these in Spotlight (Yosemite):
par
para
parall
parallel
etc
Parallels Desktop is suggested as the program to launch – which is what I want.
However – if I type 'paral' – what you would think was a good short bet to load the app – it suggests 'Pages.
I endup typing 'paral' a lot as it used to work.
I found nothing on Google.
This makes no sense. How can I fix this?
Assuming your drive passes hardware verification, you might want to rebuild your spotlight index.
First though, repair permissions as much as possible.
Rebuilding the spotlight index is straightforward but time consuming. You will see that it is indexing as the spotlight magnifying glass icon will have a dot in the center of the glass.
This is how to reindex your drive:
The Mac will probably feel sluggish during reindexing as the mdworker and mds processes run and consume a lot of CPU and cause a lot of disk activity.
After all this, if the problem still occurs, here are some other techniques:
Alternative #1: Kill SystemUIServer
Launch ‘Activity Monitor’ (located in /Applications/Utilities/).
Locate the process ‘SystemUIServer’, highlight it, and click the red button “Quit Process”.
Within a few seconds the menubar will rebuild itself and often Spotlight will magically work.
Alternative #2: Rebuild the Spotlight Index manually
Launch ‘Terminal’ (located in /Applications/Utilities/) At the command prompt, type this exactly (copy and paste): sudo mdutil -E /
You will be asked for your password, provide it, as this command requires administrator privileges to run.
You will receive a confirmation message saying that index will be rebuilt.
Wait until index is finished rebuilding, this can take a while depending on the size of your hard drive, amount of files, etc.
Alternative #3: Change Desktop Resolution
This is a strange fix but it works sometimes.
Open “System Preferences” via the Apple Menu
Click ‘Displays’ and select a resolution smaller than what you are currently using, 640×480 seems to always work
Select your native resolution again, changing your screen resolution back to normal
The Spotlight search tray will magically become available again
Alternative #4: Clear caches and preferences
Clear caches and preferences relating to Spotlight, this is best done using a tool like OnyX, MainMenu and/or Cocktail.
Alternative #5: Clean the Font caches
Sometimes, this is adequate to repair a screwy Spotlight, but it won’t hurt to clear them all
Hope this helps (I got this information from experience, but a lot of the text is lifted from OSXDaily.)
The OS X Lion 10.7.5 Supplemental Update released October 04, 2012 includes:
Resolves an issue that may cause Time Machine backups to take a very long time to complete
and, after testing, this seems to have completely resolved the issue.
Note that for me, the first backup after installing this update still took unexpectedly long, and included many com.apple.backupd[423]: Waiting for index to be ready (100) messages, so maybe Spotlight hadn't yet properly re-indexed the drive. Now, a couple hours later, small backups complete at their usual brisk pace and all is well.
Best Answer
If Parallels is in the suggestions below, scroll down and select it. Do it a couple of times and it will become the top result eventually. App launching is adaptive.