Problems with Spotlight... any way to restart it?

[john_satc]

I keep having the same problem with spotlight.
I will search for a document simply putting in the a word, such as 'papacy' (history work), knowing that there are at least half a dozen documents with 'papacy' within them. Yet, I get 'No results found'. Or I can type in exact names that I have saved documents as, and still get 'No results found'. And yet, I can go through finder and find the documents myself. This is really annoying as I am doing coursework and type in simple phrases like 'relations with papcy' which is a common theme in my documents, and yet get no results!

Is there any way I can force spotlight to restart itself, hoping this will fix the problem.

 

[Marky_Mark]

Is there any way I can force spotlight to restart itself, hoping this will fix the problem.

Go into System Prefs -> Spotlight and click on the Privacy Tab.

When you mark a disk or folder as private and non-searchable, Spotlight actually DELETES its entire index for that location, so if it's misbehaving, drag the disk/folder into the Privacy list and then back out again. Spotlight will delete and then rebuild the index for that disk/folder.

Good eh?

 

[Sedulous]

Go into System Prefs -> Spotlight and click on the Privacy Tab.

When you mark a disk or folder as private and non-searchable, Spotlight actually DELETES its entire index for that location, so if it's misbehaving, drag the disk/folder into the Privacy list and then back out again. Spotlight will delete and then rebuild the index for that disk/folder.

Good eh?

That is a much simpler solution that what I was going to suggest. However, another more direct solution that I've used is MainMenu... lets you do many things. It can be found here.