It really is. It's worthless at this point. It is completely undependable as a search tool.

Totally frustrating to use.

When I start typing a search string, and mistype something, when that beachball starts spinning, and spinning, I swear, you can hear me scream from space.

And Apple and the apologists were selling it like the best thing since blowjobs. The reality turned out to smack everyone. Spotlight is so sucky and unreliable, and forcing re-indexing SO counterintuitive, that it boggles the mind.

It just gets so frustrating when time after time it doesn't find what I know is there. Mainly I use the little search bar field at the top right of Finder windows. (That's part of Spotlight, right?) I would rather do a brute-force Sherlock-type search that started from scratch and took a little longer but was at least guaranteed to find what you are looking for.

I never knew that meta-data meant maybe-data. Yes, throw that into the lexicon by all means.

You can search from the Finder using command+f.

When you are doing the spotlight searches is from within an application. I don't usually need to do searches as I can find what I need easily using a Finder window. When I do search either using spotlight or command+f I don't seem to have any problems. i am not sure if this is correct and the reason I asked if an application was foward during spotlight searches is spotlight becomes a function of whatever app is forward. Some applications may not be integrated with spotlight as well as others.

So my suggestion is do the same things happen using spotlight with the Finder forward? If so I don't think I can help you at this time.

I'm looking at the file right there: Johnny Cash - I'll Walk the Line.mp3.

Spotlight won't find it. Command-F won't find it. But iTunes finds it just fine. It is this kind of unreliability, Rico, that means I can't trust it. The ONE thing a computer really ought to do good, OS X botches. I suppose I can reindex the drive, but that's no solution. How do I know it will do it right this time? They've really got to fix this.

Woo hoo! After reindexing, "I Walk the Line" finally appeared.

Always remember, OS X needs to be hugged, babied and all that to run properly. Majority of casual Mac-Users just love this, rebuild desktops, re-index spotlight, repair permissions, fiddle around with settings, they need to do this to feel like some kind of ad.. <cough>... min. "Most advanced OS" ... Steve, of course, yes, you're always right.

What a sweet lil' OS!

About a year or so ago, maybe more I used Spotlight to find an important file I needed to send to a customer. I didn't find it. That was puzzling because I know I had it. I assumed that I obviously must have deleted it by mistake. What else? It was on my computer, but no longer. I groaned and set to work recreating the file. When I was finished I decided to store the file deep within the nested customer directories. When I open the last folder there was the original file big as life. I had just spent hours recreating the file for nothing. All because I assumed that Spotlight, the wonderful finder of files, would find a file.

That day I disabled Spotlight and deleted all its files. What the hell do I need with a file finder that can't find files? I downloaded a freeware finder program that works great. The program is speedy and accurate at everyday jobs, but it is a bit slow finding files by content because it does no indexing. So, happily I'm free from disk grinding indexing that I hardly ever needed anyway and its the last time Spotlight will bite me on the ass. On my computer it's dead and gone as has been that way for a long time.

HH, which freeware Finder finder did you find?

I've had more embarrasing Spotlight moments than I can bear. Usually, it's when I'm on the PHONE, and some client is asking me something like "remember what I said in my email about the <whatever> job...?" I search through my emails, Spotlight can't find the reference. Fucking maddening. That software has let me down too much for me to rely on it.

In order to nursemaid Spotlight enough to have it even NOMINALLY function, I'd have to do the stupid fucking irritating counterintuitive reindexing at the end of every day. Meaning go into the Spotlight preference "PAIN"[sic], add my hard drives to "Privacy"... then un-add them to force them to reindex. My drives take 8 hours to reindex.

Auto reindexing. One button. Daily. We need it. Especially in Mail.

quote:

Originally posted by BN:
HH, which freeware Finder finder did you find?

I recommend "Easyfind". Does the Job the traditional way and never disappoints. No indexing, bit slower than pukelight, but simply works.
http://www.devon-technologies.com/download/index.html
(it's listed under "freeware applications")

quote:

Originally posted by BN:
HH, which freeware Finder finder did you find?

I used the same file finder that smithz recommends, "EasyFind." I also used a program named "Spotless" to disable Spotlight and rid myself of its large files and disk grinding indexing.

Just lately I've been using the finder window in the program "File Buddy" as my main file finder. Its finder window has a bit more flexibilty than "EasyFind" and "File Buddy" has a lot of other features for handling files on your computer. It's one of those utilities that has always been a staple on my computer since, gee I don't know, maybe since the original Mac OS 1.

Many thanks, smithz and HH. I'm going to give that a try.

You can still look for files using Sherlock or File Buddy running under Classic. Remember, my brothers, Classic still works. Even the OS9 version of Sherlock 2, which gives you a warning on launch that it's not compatible with OS X, still finds files on my hard drive.

If some developer came up with a Platinum FINDER that ran under classic, I'd use that for all my OS X file management.

My problem is, I need Spotlight (particularly in Mail) to work. That's the one place I depend on indexed/content finding.

quote:

Originally posted by thalo:
You can still look for files using Sherlock or File Buddy running under Classic. ...

My problem is, I need Spotlight (particularly in Mail) to work. That's the one place I depend on indexed/content finding.

First, you don't need to open File Buddy in Classic. I use the OS X version. It works fine.

Second, if the important searches for you have to do with email message content, that's pretty quick and easy using the File Buddy find window. Really, indexing the whole friggin' disk (and getting it wrong) is overkill for such a restricted search task. Don't ya think?

All you need to do to set up File Buddy to specifically search your email content is drag your "Mail" folder located in your OSX/user/library folder to the "Use these folders" pane on the File Buddy find window and from then on just type the content you are looking for in the "File contains" text box. When it finds the message you are looking for click on the "Open" button and it opens up in your Mail app or any other application that can read a text file if you choose.

No giant files taking up space. No snaking it's tentacles throughout your OS. And, no indexing grinding away on your hard disk. Most importantly, very much more importantly, you can rely on the results.

The way I think about Spotlight is that if it were a shareware program that did disk grinding, created giant files, took over my OS, and then in the end didn't work to the point it cost me time and money I wouldn't think twice about discarding it. It doesn't matter that Apple put it's name on this program. Bad software is bad software. Spotlight is not only poorly implemented, but in the end the user can't trust the results. It doesn't do its intended task. Why fuss with it?

Maybe in the future Spotlight might work great. It hasn't since Apple released it, but if they ever do get it working I may look at it again. Until then I've got the reliability I absolutely need and I'm not going to waste more time screwing with Spotlight.

Yes. I think I can work with this. Here's the latest version of EasyFind (version 3.9) from MacUpdate's website. And if I assign it to a hotkey via a simple macro program such as Keyboard Maestro, I can invoke it easily from anywhere. Of course, first I'll have to loosen up the wallet a bit and actually pay for Keyboard Maestro. If there's a way to do that through Automator, well, I haven't found it.

It looks like EasyFind will get the job done. And I never thought of using Sherlock 2 for searching. The advantage of Sherlock is that you can see the path to the file. The advantage of EasyFind would seem to be that it puts some of the most-used settings right there for you to choose from.


...but in the end the user can't trust the results.

Yeah, I think that's the issue here. If the user interface was a bit clumsy, if it was slow, if it wasn't very customizabele, but if it at least worked then it would have fulfilled its most important requirement. But if sometimes it finds things and sometime not, that's not considered "working", not for a find-file program, at least. And I think you're spot-on with the shareware analogy.

At this point I think I would recommend File Buddy's find window over EasyFind as a file finder. In the example I gave above File Buddy can find content in Mail messages. EasyFind cannot. Overall, File Buddy is more flexible than EasyFind, and of course the program does a lot more than EasyFind.

If you do use a file finder other than Spotlight I recommend you disable Spotlight using the program "Spotless" to stop its pointless indexing. Even if you continue to use Spotlight I would still recommend Spotless. Spotless lets you completely delete Spotlight's index files which forces Spotlight to create new ones from scratch. This may be faster than forcing Spotlight to repair them which is what I think other methods of reindexing do. Rebuilding from scratch is more accurate and more certain to produce reliable results, at least for a while.

Oh wow, I've used File Buddy for years prior to OS X, and simply assumed it wouldn't find email content in Mail, so never tried. I really don't know why I stopped using the OS X version, I think I was having trouble with it in version 7. You got me all excited, so I downloaded FB9, bought the upgrade license.

I tried searching for content of emails using the strategy you suggested. I copied a text string from the body of an existing email and tried to do a search for it. At first it failed, because I stupidly did "name contains" instead of "file contains"... next try found it, seemed a bit slow, but holy crap, it worked. Thank God.

There are so many things in File Buddy that make it absolutely essential. I was launching it in Classic to do these things, but version 9 seems to do them just fine. Renaming series of files sequentially via the contextual menu is worth the price of the software. So is the "Accessed" feature.

So far, version 9 seems to work fine.

quote:

... next try found it, seemed a bit slow, but holy crap, it worked. Thank God.

Yep, Spotlight is indeed faster -- at not working.

Give the program "Spotless" a try. It's been a year or more since I've used it, but I swear that completely deleting the index files resulted in Spotlight rebuilding them in an hour or so rather than the hours and hours I was expecting. I seem to remember it took many hours if I forced Spotlight to reindex the existing files.

Maybe I'm remembering it wrong, but it's worth a try. Spotless could be that reindexing "one button" you talked about. It's a only a ten buck or so utility and its functionality is fully available to try even without the shareware fee if you don't mind waiting through the 15 second delay. But, if it does the job for you do send the shareware fee. We need to encourage these sort of solutions to Apple screw-ups.

Thanks, brother HH, I will go get Spotless right now.

I have been trying to find rhyme or reason why Spotlight stops working. It's not simply the things-last-indexed, or not-yet-indexed. In Mail, figure I've rebuilt and reindexed so many times, the OLDER emails should all be in there, ready to be searched by content (looking for strings in "Entire Message")... and yet, that stuff fails too. Sometimes it's precisely the older emails that aren't giving up hits, while a mail I got yesterday is.

Meanwhile, I've nursemaided and gotten Mail to a point where Spotlight SEEMS to work again, only to have this degrade with use (a pattern in OS X I'm constantly pointing out)... and eventually get to a state where stuff I've searched for--and found--a few days ago, no longer comes up on the search results. Maddening.