Odd Spotlight Error / Problem

Just experienced a rather strange problem with Spotlight under Mac OS X.

I actually use Spotlight quite a bit. It is a great way to search and to ‘see’ inside files. I find it great for finding lost bits of text or code, and half-remembered e-mails, letters or reports.

Anyway, the weird thing was that it wouldn’t find anything that was created or modified before 2006. This was a bit inconvenient, particularly when searching for an e-mail from several years ago (the problem was apparent when using the main Spotlight icon, or even searching within Mail). This was all getting to be rather annoying.

Searching the System Preferences didn’t reveal any search settings that were set to say ‘only search 2006′. So finally I decided to rebuild the Spotlight index, which can be carried out following these steps:

1. Go to the ‘System Preferences’.
2. Click on the ‘Spotlight’ icon in the ‘Personal’ area in the ‘System Preferences’.
3. Click on the ‘Privacy’ tag.
4. Click the ‘+’ (‘Add’) button to add a ‘Prevent Spotlight from…’ searching entry.
5. From the Window that appears select either the ‘Hard-drive’ icon or your ‘home folder’.
6. Click ‘OK’.

Your ‘home folder’ or ‘Hard-drive’ should now have been added to the list of areas that Spotlight does not search.

Next:

1. Select the ‘home folder’ or ‘Hard-drive’ in the list of ‘Prevent Spotlight from…’ items.
2. Click the ‘-’ (or ‘Remove’) button to remove ‘home folder’ or ‘Hard-drive’ from the list.
3. Quit the ‘System preferences’.

Carrying out the above will cause Spotlight to re-index the ‘home folder’ or ‘Hard-drive’ you added and then removed from the list.

You can tell that Spotlight is carrying out a ‘re-indexing’ because a tiny white dot flashes in the centre of the Spotlight icon; selecting the Spotlight icon will bring up a dialog that say indexing is being carried out; searching Mail or the Address Book will not work!

Carrying out above, and then waiting an hour or so for the new index to be built fixed my problem and I can now search back before 2006 on my machine….