Episode #178
I planned to write about some smart home products I’ve been testing, but a confluence of events convinced me to change courses midstream. So I’m going to write about troubleshooting Spotlight this week, since that’s what I’ve been doing all morning.
It all began because I knew I wrote a column about Phillips Hue Personal Wireless Lighting sometime last year. So, I typed, “Hue” into the Spotlight search field of my Dr. Mac Columns folder and limited my search to that folder. Spotlight didn’t find anything but I was positive I wrote about it last year.
Searching all 20 years of Dr. Mac columns didn’t find a single mention of “Hue.”
So I repeated the search, this time searching only one year of columns in my Dr. Mac Columns 2015 folder. But Spotlight still failed to find a single file containing, “Hue.”
I repeated both searches for, “Phillips” rather than, “Hue,” but, Spotlight still failed to find a single file.
I restarted my Mac—‘cause it never hurts—but the problem persisted. I suspected that Spotlight’s index had become corrupted—either that or I had imagined writing a column about Hue lights last year.
So I searched the web for, “Dr. Mac Houston Chronicle Phillips Hue,” as a sanity check, and confirmed that I had indeed written a column about Hue lights on February 23, 2015.
I found it on the web so I knew I wasn’t going crazy.
Now that I knew the date it ran, I checked the Dr. Mac Columns 2015 folder to see if the actual file was missing or damaged, but it was right where it was supposed to be. I opened the file, too, in case it had become corrupted or otherwise unreadable, but the file was fine.
Having confirmed that Spotlight was broken, I set out to find a solution with Google-Fu, searching for, “Spotlight El Capitan not working,” which had over 600,000 hits. Fortunately, the second link I clicked offered a simple solution for rebuilding Spotlight’s index and one that worked for me:
1. Open System Preferences. 2. Click on Spotlight. 3. Click the Privacy Tab. 4. Click the + button at bottom and select your startup disk to disable Spotlight.You’ve now disabled Spotlight and deleted its index. Wait a minute or two and then: 5. Select the disk you just added and click the – (minus) button at the bottom to delete it.
You see what just happened? You disabled Spotlight and then re-enabled it, causing it to delete its old index and create a fresh, new one. To prove it to yourself, click the Spotlight icon in the menu bar and type at least one character and you’ll see the word, “indexing” and a progress thermometer at the top of the results list. When the progress thermometer disappears, Spotlight will once again work as promised.
When the progress thermometer is full, Spotlight will once again work as advertised.
The moral of the story is that regardless of whether you’re having problems with Spotlight, all you need is a search engine and a few judicious keywords to solve almost any common tech problem.
And that’s all he wrote…