Spotlight insanity

[mikeyredk]

Ahh I want to kill spotlight. It won't search properly, I searched for transportation costs and it did transportation "or" costs not transportation "and" costs it has done this before with documents resulting in dud results. anyone else experience this?

 

[VanNess]

Instead of typing transportation costs, type "transportation costs" (with the quotes) and Spotlight will search for the phrase instead of applying each word separately

 

[mikeyredk]

That causes spotlight to return no results even for stuff i know is there.

 

[mad jew]

Weird. Maybe remove com.apple.spotlight.plist and see if that helps.

 

[leQ]

i'm in spotlight insanity hell now, after spending over an hour listening to some applecare 'specialist' breath heavy into the mic and telling me that there was nothing she could offer me other than a archive/reinstall.

spotlight opens its lil' menu and just sits there and does nothing. i am unable to drag anything into the privacy area in the spotlight prefs pane. i've checked and unchecked items in the search results pane, to no avail.

i had this problem when i first got the quad, and i had a friend log in from new york and was able to fix it - he's off hiking in asia now so he can't rescue me. i jus wish someone knew what he did. and certainly someone over at apple should know, yet this applecare specialist barely knew her name without looking at the screen.

there's GOTTA be a better way. there jus HAS to be. apple can't be THAT stupid.... can they?

--one who made the switch, and starting to regret it.

 

[haiggy]

i'm in spotlight insanity hell now, after spending over an hour listening to some applecare 'specialist' breath heavy into the mic and telling me that there was nothing she could offer me other than a archive/reinstall.

spotlight opens its lil' menu and just sits there and does nothing. i am unable to drag anything into the privacy area in the spotlight prefs pane. i've checked and unchecked items in the search results pane, to no avail.

i had this problem when i first got the quad, and i had a friend log in from new york and was able to fix it - he's off hiking in asia now so he can't rescue me. i jus wish someone knew what he did. and certainly someone over at apple should know, yet this applecare specialist barely knew her name without looking at the screen.

there's GOTTA be a better way. there jus HAS to be. apple can't be THAT stupid.... can they?

--one who made the switch, and starting to regret it.

So you're staying that you are regretting switching over a hard time with Spotlight? If you want to go back to viruses and spyware, then be my guest!

 

[Lacero]

Have you tried re-indexing Spotlight by dragging the HD disk icon into the Privacy window, and then removing it.

Spotlight plugins are continually being added to third party apps, so in time, you'll see more search results show up in Spotlight results. In the meantime, I'd workaround with folder aliases.

Here's to the Crazy Ones ​

 

[iMeowbot]

Yeah, the whitespace AND is flaky. You can try the + operator, transportation+costs in your example, so see if you get different results. Sometimes Spotlight will return different/better results if you reverse the terms, i.e. costs+transportation

 

[pknz]

there's GOTTA be a better way. there jus HAS to be. apple can't be THAT stupid.... can they?

--one who made the switch, and starting to regret it.

If you regret it go back, no ones making you use a Mac.

 

[mad jew]

Come on sweeties, let's play nice.

leQ, considering you are having trouble with the privacy section of Spotlight, reindexing may be a hassle. Have you deleted com.apple.spotlight.plist? Does the same problem occur in all accounts? If you don't have another account, you can make one from the Accounts section of System Preferences.

Is this the only problem with your computer? I'm asking on the basis that there may be a deeper issue than just the Spotlight preferences.