Macos – “Stuff” dissapearing from spotlight search

macosspotlight

Question

  1. What is causing this to happen?
  2. What can I do to fix it?

    Background

I use spotlight to launch my applications much like quicksilver and have recently found that many of my applications aren't showing up in the spotlight search.

Context

I am on a MacBook Pro running Mac OS 10.6 and have been sing spotlight without any problems for almost a year now. I switched to 10.6 when it was released almost a month ago and this problem didn't start until about 2 days ago and was not right after an update to the OS.

I know someone is going to say it so I will just get it out of the way right now. "Use quicksilver" I am currently using quicksilver until I get spotlight working again. I don't like the idea of things disappearing from spotlight so I would still like to figure out what's going on and fix it. Thank you very much in advance for your help.

Answer

A special thanks to joshhunt and choge for their answers. Both their answers completely answer the question but joshhunts question got selected because that is what I needed to fix the problem. I have written a how to on my blog with the combination of their answers. superuser.com Rocks!

Best Answer

First, make sure Applications (and the others that you want) is selected in System Preferences > Spotlight.

If that does not work, it is possible somehow indexing got disabled. In terminal, run the following command:

sudo mdutil -E /

Still, if that fails try deleting the Spotlight index and start indexing it again:

sudo rm -r /.Spotlight-V<TAB>
sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist
sudo mdutil -E /

On my machine, the Spotlight index was .Spotlight-V100, but I have seen it as other, that is why used tab completion

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