Does Spotlight Even Work?!

[codepoet80]

Wondering if anyone out there is having problems with Spotlight in 10.4? When I first booted up I saw it running the index, and I assumed that meant it was running fine. After a couple days with the Mac running not stop, I decided to try it out.
First I searched for "pay" as in "Pay Day" in iCal, and even though I could see the recurring event, Spotlight was unable to find it.
The I decided to try it out in Mail.app and searched for "tickets" -- I'm arranging a trip to Asia for the summer, and I have dozens of e-mails from my travel agent regarding the plane tickets. Again, no results were returned -- even though I could see some of the e-mails on the screen.
Finally I decided to search my file system for "Green Day" knowing full well that I have two of their albums on my external FireWire drive. No results where returned, so I copied the folders to my internal hard drive, opened one of them and searched again. As in the previous search attempts, nothing came back.

My question is, does Spotlight ignore file names? I have successfully searched for file contents -- it returns Word documents with keywords in the file -- but all attempts to find the above items by name have failed. Has anyone had similar problems with Spotlight? Any tips for getting reliable results?

 

[GimmeSlack12]

Did you let Spotlight completely index? Cause it took a few hours for my comp to index, and after that Spotlight seems to run just as promised. Finds all types of things I had no idea were still on my computer.
There's a method of re-indexing that I just saw on Macworld's site, maybe give that a shot.

 

[buryyourbrideau]

hell yes it works and works beautifully. helps me find all those hidden files remaining after i trash an app. LOVE

 

[DXoverDY]

works wonderfully for me too. i had an issue with Delicious Library not working right with spotlight but fixed that by reimporting everything. otherwise it works great.

 

[Mitthrawnuruodo]

Seems to be working just fine... haven't NOT found anything, yet...

 

[beatle888]

i have problems with spotlight not finding files on the desktop or even the user documents folder. i guess it doesnt index your whole system initially. however there is no clear way to add areas you would like it to index. you can try this. open up the preferences and in the privacy tab add your WHOLE freaken hard drive (if thats what you wish). then close preferences. open preferences back up and remove the added drive from the privacy pane. close the preferences. spotlight should now reindex that drive.

this makes spotlight reindex the drive, i dont know if spotlight will include the whole drive at this point. i have to check that out.

you would think apple would allow you to ADD (helllllooooo) ADD areas you would like to index. and why wouldnt it automatically add the users document folder?

its new, bound to be bugs.

 

[srobert]

works wonderfully for me too. i had an issue with Delicious Library not working right with spotlight but fixed that by reimporting everything. otherwise it works great.

Off topic but I'm in love with delicious library. It's one of the best Application ever created and it's useful to 99% of users. Not much needs improving... except that we need "smart" shelves (à la smart folders). Kudos for the iSight barcode scanner.

Spotlight works great for me. I love how it can find text inside PDFs. I'm a Pen and paper RPG gamer and have purchased many eBooks (rulebooks) and it's very usefull to search and find info in multiple pdfs at the same time without tediously opening each PDF book.

I Hearth^2 Spotlight.

Note to myself: Secret stash of porn is now too easy to find. Needs to be encrypted