Spotlight is pretty fantastic, and the other computer nerd in my class at school (who poked fun at my new-to-me Macbook) was flat-out impressed with the robustness of the software, and he himself is considering buying a Mac!

But that was a week ago--just earlier today I noticed that Spotlight was indexing, and it was taking a while, so I waited and eventually forgot about it until about an hour ago. It was still indexing with no estimated time of completion, so I started googling. I excluded my bootcamp drive and rebooted, which seems to have stopped the constant indexing, but now I've got a problem that I can't even find any references to.

Here's the issue: every second or two Spotlight's icon looks like its indexing, but it lasts for less than a second, then a couple seconds later it's indexing again, but for less than a second. I can type a quick search in, and it finds stuff, but then it's replaced with a 'Spotlight is Indexing... ' notification.

Hilfe!!

Ah! It's now gone back to constantly indexing while I was writing the above post, roughly 10~15 minutes after a reboot.

Is there a master index file I can wipe out, or would that be useless? I'd rather not give this feature the boot, I've grown quite fond of it!

Disregard--erased the index, rebooted, and Spotlight says 12h for a full re-index. We'll see what happens in the morning.

And that's with just one HD and a single partition at that. Wait till you have multiple drives perhaps with multiple partitions.

I ended up disabling Spotlight altogether, which forces me to use Find Any File for searches.

Have been saying for years that most users can get by without content indexing. Apple should provide the pre Tiger option of content indexing off but normal search functions working. They know how to do it but choose not to.

Content indexing was available back as far as OS 8.6, though no one used it because it was a PIA. The latter is still true but the option of not using it is not as easily available.

Well, this is one drive with three partitions, and I've disabled the bootcamp one which leaves just the MacOS and my Fileshare partitions to index, which is about 3/5ths of the 500gb drive I've got, and most of it is empty space.

Right-o, so, update: "Estimating index time" and it's still running. If I disable it for my MacOS drive and have it just index my Fileshare drive, will it still be able to find settings (eg. I'll search for account settings, or diskconfig rather than go into the sys prefs window), or emails?

So I blindly deleted the com.apple.finder.plist file then relaunched Finder and, aside from loosing all my Finder settings, has calmed down Spotlight--it was indexing for 68 seconds, then stopped, and everything seems fine now. Fingers crossed... going to try a reboot now...

Well, this is one drive with three partitions, and I've disabled the bootcamp one which leaves just the MacOS and my Fileshare partitions to index, which is about 3/5ths of the 500gb drive I've got, and most of it is empty space.

Right-o, so, update: "Estimating index time" and it's still running. If I disable it for my MacOS drive and have it just index my Fileshare drive, will it still be able to find settings (eg. I'll search for account settings, or diskconfig rather than go into the sys prefs window), or emails?

Sadly no. For whatever reason beginning with Tiger, the built in search engine requires content-indexing even though most of us very seldom search by content. This is a change from earlier versions of OS X, OS 9 and even OS8.6 all of which could index content but did not require it. I believe some third party alternatives may allow you to index content in the wee hours of the morning only, but that of course means the computer has to be up and running at that time. One time indexing with manually triggered indexing updates may also be possible via third party utilities. Never really looked into these alternatives as FindAnyFile is all I need to find things.

The free app FindAnyFile will do routine file searches using parameters such as creation or modification dates, file names.... It will not search the eMail data base.

iTunes is independent of Spotlight and within iTunes you can easily search your iTunes library or play lists by name, artists name...

A lot depends on how you use your computer. I know several individuals with Massive Mail data bases and they absolutely depend on Spotlight to find whatever eMail is currently of interest.

My best advice is to routinely schedule a time to rebuild the Spotlight data base and as you did delete the .plist file whenever Spotlight causes problems.

Alrighty, what wound up fixing the problem was repairing my disk permissions in the Disk Utility. Holy moley, it works great again!

Hopefully this will help someone else in the future :)