Spotlight Oddities

I am still fairly new to the Mac, had mine just over a month now. What has struck me is how slow spotlight is. I come from Windows 7, which has a fantastic instant search. I am not sure if my expectations of spotlight are off or if I have some issue I am unfamiliar with.

I've researched this quite a bit. There do seem to be random complaints about spotlight. Usually people recommend getting more ram, rebuilding the index, or repairing permissions. I have tried repairing permissions, that is about it. I am not sure how the index is rebuilt, or I would be willing to try that.

What seems to happen is sometimes I just do not get the results I want. I will type in a query, and wait for 10 - 20 seconds for the document I want to show up. It usually never does.



If I delete the query, then try again immediately afterwards, the document I want shows up.



Is this behavior expected? This is snow leopard fully updated on a Macbook Pro 2.53Ghz i5 and 4GB Ram with the 500GB 7200 RPM hard drive. While the query is running, I have Word, Outlook, Safari, and sometimes Xcode and the terminal open.

Should I just leave it be, that is how it is, deal with it? Or is rebuilding the index something I have to do regularly, or maybe some other voodoo magic trick?

I tried the rebuilding of the index. I added / to the private tab, then waited for a bit and then removed it. I saw that spotlight was reindexing the drive. The same behavior still exists. And as I mentioned earlier, I already tried repairing permissions.

Animalk said:

I've also noticed this odd behaviour from Spotlight.

Sometimes I get the opposite behaviour where if I wait too long, the desired result disappears from the list.

Click to expand...

Perhaps it is just an isolated error. It works perfect for finding applications. Very poor part of the OS.