Spotlight crashes after two letters have been entered

spotlight

OS X 10.11 on an early 2015 MBP

I am trying to search for a document called Starfleet, but after entering the letters "ST", Spotlight crashes.

Relevant logs:

02/10/15 12:12:37,642 Spotlight[1566]: XPC connection was invalidated
02/10/15 12:12:37,824 spindump[769]: Got xpc error message in
libspindump client connection: Connection invalid 02/10/15
12:12:37,825 com.apple.xpc.launchd[1]: (com.apple.Spotlight[1566])
Service exited due to signal: Segmentation fault: 11 02/10/15
12:12:37,845 com.apple.xpc.launchd[1]: (com.apple.ReportCrash[1723])
Endpoint has been activated through legacy launch(3) APIs. Please
switch to XPC or bootstrap_check_in(): com.apple.ReportCrash 02/10/15
12:12:37,852 ReportCrash[1723]: platform_thread_get_unique_id matched
158875 02/10/15 12:12:37,852 ReportCrash[1723]: Activity ID for thread
0x26c9b – 0x73f7a 02/10/15 12:12:38,217 ReportCrash[1723]: Saved crash
report for Spotlight[1566] version 1.0 (972.9) to
/Users/user/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/Spotlight_2015-10-02-121238_computer.crash

Report:

Process: Spotlight [1566] Path:
/System/Library/CoreServices/Spotlight.app/Contents/MacOS/Spotlight
Identifier: com.apple.Spotlight Version: 1.0
(972.9) Build Info: SpotlightUI-972009000000000~1 Code
Type: X86-64 (Native) Parent Process: ??? [1]
Responsible: Spotlight [1566] User ID: 501

Date/Time: 2015-10-02 12:12:37.852 +0200 OS Version:
Mac OS X 10.11 (15A284) Report Version: 11 Anonymous UUID:
BF4F07CD-F3A3-3FE4-A07E-30BF365DFB58

Sleep/Wake UUID: EED97237-AF4B-48E7-9073-0F30A512606F

Time Awake Since Boot: 9100 seconds Time Since Wake: 7300
seconds

System Integrity Protection: enabled

Crashed Thread: 5 Dispatch queue:
com.apple.root.user-interactive-qos.overcommit

Exception Type: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV) Exception Codes:
KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS at 0x000000010c780000 Exception Note:
EXC_CORPSE_NOTIFY

VM Regions Near 0x10c780000:
mapped file 000000010c70e000-000000010c780000 [ 456K] r–/r-x SM=ALI
–>
CoreAnimation 000000010c7c6000-000000010c7dc000 [ 88K] rw-/rwx SM=PRV

[…]

Thread 5 Crashed:: Dispatch queue:
com.apple.root.user-interactive-qos.overcommit 0
libsystem_platform.dylib 0x00007fff8df54f49
_platform_memmove$VARIANT$Haswell + 41 1 com.apple.DictionaryServices 0x00007fff928fc127
HeapAccessContext::getDataByID(unsigned long long, long, unsigned
char*) + 477 2 com.apple.DictionaryServices 0x00007fff928ff0bc
TrieAccessContext::getHeapData(unsigned long long, long*) + 226 3
com.apple.DictionaryServices 0x00007fff928fecf8
TrieAccessContext::getMatchDataCommon(long, unsigned char const**,
long*, bool, CFRange*, unsigned char*, unsigned char*, long*) + 2062 4
com.apple.DictionaryServices 0x00007fff928fee75
TrieAccessContext::getMatchData(long, long, unsigned char*, CFRange**,
long*) + 73 5 com.apple.DictionaryServices 0x00007fff928fa210
IDXGetMatchData + 53 6 com.apple.DictionaryServices
0x00007fff928efe2b
DCSIDXDictionary::searchByString_internal(__CFString const*, long,
long) + 793 7 com.apple.DictionaryServices 0x00007fff928ef917
DCSIDXDictionary::searchByString(__CFString const*, long, long) + 43 8
com.apple.DictionaryServices 0x00007fff928f3bcd
DCSCopyRecordsForSearchString + 147 9 com.apple.ParsecUI
0x00007fff8896cfdb -[SPKDictionaryQuery start] + 773 10
com.apple.Spotlight 0x0000000107e6e076 0x107e40000 + 188534
11 libdispatch.dylib 0x00007fff942148ff
_dispatch_call_block_and_release + 12 12 libdispatch.dylib 0x00007fff94209453 _dispatch_client_callout + 8 13 libdispatch.dylib
0x00007fff9420d2e3 _dispatch_root_queue_drain + 1890 14
libdispatch.dylib 0x00007fff9420cb48
_dispatch_worker_thread3 + 91 15 libsystem_pthread.dylib 0x00007fff8499e4f2 _pthread_wqthread + 1129 16
libsystem_pthread.dylib 0x00007fff8499c375 start_wqthread + 13

[…] Logical CPU: 0 Error Code: 0x00000004 Trap Number:
14

[…]

VM Region Summary: ReadOnly portion of Libraries: Total=318.4M
resident=0K(0%) swapped_out_or_unallocated=318.4M(100%) Writable
regions: Total=391.4M written=0K(0%) resident=0K(0%)
swapped_out=0K(0%) unallocated=391.4M(100%)

                            VIRTUAL   REGION  REGION TYPE                        SIZE    COUNT (non-coalesced) 

=========== ======= ======= Accelerate.framework 128K 2 Activity Tracing 2048K 2 CG
backing stores 16K 2 CG image
52K 6 CG shared images 208K 6
CoreAnimation 2172K 76 CoreUI image data
336K 11 CoreUI image file 224K 5
Dispatch continuations 8192K 2 Foundation
20K 3 Kernel Alloc Once 8K 3 MALLOC
175.8M 39 MALLOC guard page 32K 7 MALLOC_LARGE (reserved) 169.8M 2 reserved VM
address space (unallocated) Memory Tag 241 8K
2 Memory Tag 242 12K 2 OpenCL
8K 2 Process Corpse Info 2048K 2 STACK
GUARD 56.1M 16 Stack
14.7M 18 VM_ALLOCATE 736K 18
__DATA 35.2M 336
__IMAGE 528K 2
__LINKEDIT 88.0M 7
__TEXT 230.3M 344
__UNICODE 552K 2 mapped file 616.6M 65 shared memory 16.3M 8
=========== ======= ======= TOTAL 1.4G 962 TOTAL, minus reserved VM space 1.2G 962

Best Answer

The solution above did not work for me: problem still occurred when re-indexing was over. I found a solution here: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8546951

You must uncheck the "Bookmarks & History" option in the Spotlight pane of System Preferences. It fixed instantly the problem for me.