How do you know if Spotlight is indexing?

[Geoff777]

All of a sudden "search" in Outlook for Mac has stopped working completely. It displays "No results" whatever I search for.
I followed the guidance about adding, and then removing the User Profiles folder to "Spotlight / Privacy" in system preferences but nothing seems to be happening.
I checked Activity Monitor and doesn't look like much going on there..... is there any way to see if the Mac is actually indexing anything?
Thanks!

 

[chscag]

An easy way to identify that mds and Spotlight is indexing is to look at the Spotlight icon in the upper right corner of your menubar, when Spotlight is indexing the magnifying glass will have a dot in the center like so:

Also, you can open Activity Monitor and see what the "MDS" process is doing. That process indicates that Spotlight is indexing.

 

[Geoff777]

Thanks very much for the quick reply..... seems it's not working! There is no dot in the magnifying glass (super handy tip!) and MDS is using 0% of CPU..... I'll try again

 

[KoolAid-Drink]

An easy way to identify that mds and Spotlight is indexing is to look at the Spotlight icon in the upper right corner of your menubar, when Spotlight is indexing the magnifying glass will have a dot in the center like so:

Also, you can open Activity Monitor and see what the "MDS" process is doing. That process indicates that Spotlight is indexing.

Is that still true? I haven't seen the inner dot for a long time, since maybe Mountain Lion or so.

How I can tell Spotlight is indexing: start a search. It'll show inside the window that Spotlight is indexing, with a progress bar.

 

[doolar]

Is that still true? I haven't seen the inner dot for a long time, since maybe Mountain Lion or so.

How I can tell Spotlight is indexing: start a search. It'll show inside the window that Spotlight is indexing, with a progress bar.

I saw the dot very briefly after I did a clean install of Big Sur on my 2017 MBP, but it disappeared quickly.

 

[Geoff777]

Just to round off - first, thanks for the replies.
What I did was opened System Prefs / Privacy and dropped my user folder in the window (to say don't index). Waited 20 seconds or so (because when I did earlier it didn't do anything, too quick maybe?) and then selected and removed (-).

Went to Spotlight, searched for a random word and as pointed out by Kool-Aid, a bar came on top of the window showing progress and "indexing".

That was about 10 hours ago and the bar is about 80% complete. MDS and other MDS variants are using about 8% CPU between them - couldn't they use more and get this done quicker!!!???

Checked Outlook and it now shows some hits, so YAY, it's working.

I don't think the problem was Big Sur - I omitted to mention that I've just downloaded MacCleaner Pro and I think I may have ticked "re-index" in the speed-up section at some stage of fiddling.

That'll teach me!! 🤣

 

[imom]

Connecting my external hard disk seems to trigger hours of indexing (as confirmed by the multiple active instances of 'mdworker_shared' in the activity monitor using the CPU). However, there is no indication in Spotlight that any indexing is going on or any way to check the progress of the indexing. This seems to happen on all releases of Big Sur so far, including 11.3.