- 2005.10.25
Some weeks ago I posted an article, A Big
Oversight in Spotlight's Searches, about how Spotlight was having
difficulty searching for filenames on my computer when they contained a
period. I received several reader comments from a variety of people,
all of whom reported that they were not experiencing such problems.
As it turned out, I could not reproduce the problem after reading
these suggestions, leading me to wonder whether or not I was losing my
mind - had I not collected screen shots during the earlier effort I
would have wondered whether or not I was not doing something right or
was really tired or something.
One thing that's more disturbing to a computer user than a problem
that won't go away is a problem that is not reproducible on demand.
Computers are machines and are supposed to behave consistently within
the rules of how they are programmed. Things are not supposed to be
random, mysterious, or unexplainable - despite how our coworkers view
them - so this Spotlight thing was very puzzling, and I filed it away
for future enlightenment.
I just had another one of those "file not found" experiences. For
several weeks I've been convinced that Spotlight cannot find all the
files on my disk - not just the contents, I mean even the filenames.
While waiting for Spotlight to keep spinning, I often just go to the
Finder and navigate around and find the file myself before it does.
Once I open the file, the file appears instantly in Spotlight's list
as if to say, "Oh yeah, I meant to do that."
Obviously something is wrong. Either Spotlight is broken, written
wrong, or my new computer is facing a meltdown. I believe my Spotlight
is broken. I read in various forums about deleting Spotlight's index
and having it reindex the hard drive. That sounds nice until you have
to sit and wait for hours while it chews up your CPU cycles doing
it.
Another solution I found was to try a third party program. The
program I tried was EasyFind. What a difference! Look at these results
for a search on my hard drive for the term "parallax."
Spotlight is on the left, and EasyFind is on the right. You can see
several differences between the lists. Notably, Spotlight did not index
my AppleWorks or all of my Microsoft Word
files.
And when I open one of the files, it will belatedly appear in
Spotlight.
Consequently I downloaded EasyFind and installed it on my Dock. I
usually know the titles of my documents, and frankly I just don't trust
Spotlight.
I think I'll eventually have to look into this corrupted search
index thing, but honestly, this have never shouldn come up in the first
place.
is a longtime Mac user. He was using digital sensors on Apple II computers in the 1980's and has networked computers in his classroom since before the internet existed. In 2006 he was selected at the California Computer Using Educator's teacher of the year. His students have used NASA space probes and regularly participate in piloting new materials for NASA. He is the author of two books and numerous articles and scientific papers. He currently teaches astronomy and physics in California, where he lives with his twin sons, Jony and Ben.< And there's still a Mac G3 in his classroom which finds occasional use.
