Spotlight not finding everything it should

Mikuro

Mikuro

Crotchety UI Nitpicker
Been playing around with Spotlight. One of the things I was looking forward to doing was creating Smart Folders to match my iTunes Smart Playlists. I use Smart Playlists for all my organization, and insert little tags into my mp3s' comments for the sorting.

Spotlight works, and gets the data from these tags. However, it's passing over the majority of matching files! :eek: Why? Did the indexing go awry? And if so, is there any way to force a re-indexing?

To make it all the more confusing, I just tried the same test I was messing with before, and now it returns twice as many items! It's still missing about 20%, though. Spotlight's kindasorta worthless if it doesn't find all the relevent results. I am not pleased. :(

Has anyone else done such tests? Any advice?

I've also been using Spotlight for some image organization, too. But I have no way to verify its results there. I'm starting to wonder if I can ever trust Spotlight for anything.
 
i'seen the same thing on mine - i wanted a new video smart folder for my camera vids - it found about 30% of the videos on the drive, and wouldn't find any more - they're there - i know where they are. kinda negates the point a bit
 
Most likely reply is that Spotlight hasn't finished indexing your hard drive. I have the same problem. My computer has been indexing for over 8H now, and the index file is 1GB . To see the size of the index file, and whether it's changing, run:

cd /
sudo ls -l .Spotlight-V100/

Does anyone here know how to read one of these db files to see how much Spotlight has indexed? I'm at a 1GB index and it shows no sign of stopping... Help!!!
 
Spotlight took about an hour or two to finish for me. When I clicked the Spotlight icon, there was no input field, and it said it was indexing and had a progress bar. I saw it complete. So unless it finished without actually doing me whole disk (which would be even worse!), that's not the problem.

I entered those commands into Terminal, and got this output:
Code: 
ls: -lh: No such file or directory
ls: ls: No such file or directory
.Spotlight-V100/:
total 192600
-rw-------   1 root  admin         0 May  1 05:47 .journalHistoryLog
-rw-------   1 root  admin  29642752 May  1 06:11 .store.db
-rw-------   1 root  admin  39321600 May  1 06:05 ContentIndex.db
-rw-------   1 root  admin       378 Apr 30 19:15 _rules.plist
-rw-------   1 root  admin  29642752 May  1 06:11 store.db
I have no idea what that means, or what I should be looking for.
 
i got this. easter eggs by spiderman geeks...... (which makes me a spiderman geek...)
 

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still doesn't help us though - my spotlight's getting worse - it's actually slower at chucking out results now than panther was - and it's not being any more intuitive - only using filenames (i searched "holst". instead of bringing up any planets tracks, or any design work i'm doing at the moment for the planets, it took about 30 seconds to find one file - "05 stellar holster.m4a"). i want it to work but i'm getting less and less inspired by tiger.
 
maybe leave it index overnight, it might be fast again once it's finished. That's what I'm planning to do anyway. My .Spotlight-V100 directory is now 2.6GB and growing. But then again, with 400,000 files on my computer it's probably not surprising...
 
no - it's not not doing anything! it's sitting idle now, and has done since yesterday. all the while soptlight is a $100 useless option for me
 
Shouldn't be a GB, really. Mine's about 80 MB, and that sounds more reasonable. And I don't have _such_ a little amount of files to index...
 
melkor445 said:
maybe leave it index overnight, it might be fast again once it's finished. That's what I'm planning to do anyway. My .Spotlight-V100 directory is now 2.6GB and growing. But then again, with 400,000 files on my computer it's probably not surprising...
Click to expand...
I've got 300,000 on mine, and it's only 40 MB....2.6GB seems more than a little extreme.

I've done a little more testing. I know it's not that some of my files just haven't been indexed, because I can find them using other criteria (for example, searching by artist).

Here are the details of my comment-sorting system: I insert little number tags like this: [1][2][3]. Each number represents a smart playlist, and any file can have any combination of these (I use a set of AppleScripts for easy manipulation of these tags). There are 350 songs in my [7] playlist. If I do a Spotlight comment search for [7], I get 122 items. If I do a GENERAL search for [7], I get 282. If I do a comment search for 7 (without the brackets), I think I get all the relvent results, plus 19 that are completely irrelevent (*sigh*). I have no idea where it's getting some of those results from, because they don't have any 7s ANYWHERE.


On a semi-related note, I just realized that Spotlight doesn't let you search for items that DON'T match your criteria. You can search for comments by "contains", "starts with", "ends with", and "is", but not "does not contain". Spotlight is seeming more and more half-assed every time I use it. :mad:
 
It _could_ be that the brackets confuse Spotlight in some weird way... That they're, hmm..., ignored? That would be to simple, I guess...
 
something happened.

i restarted, as illustrator was running like a dog (as it does. i hate cs) and when it came back, it was factory settings. with the dock full of '?'. GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR

hard drive is untouched though - so no files lost, just settings

subnote! spotlight is now indexing Tom's Powermac G5 Computer. properly, and telling me it's doing it. so after it's finished, i can probably say it works properly!

so sort of good. just lost 6 hours in the process though.
 
I think I've finally made (some) sense of it. You're right, the brackets do play a role, but not the way you'd expect. Take a look at these results of searches in both iTunes and Spotlight:
iTunes search for "ff": 680
iTunes search for "[ff]": 647
Spotlight "catch-all" search for "ff": 647

When Spotlight searches for "ff" (without brackets), it only finds the instances that appear in brackets! (I verified the lists, and they are identical; it's not just coincidence that they have the same number of files.) It does NOT find the instances that appear outside of brackets.

Why? My guess is because all the other instances are in the middle of words. I guess Spotlight does not consider those to be "real" matches, and Spotlight must consider the brackets as a kind of word break. The reason it doesn't find all the results when I search WITH the brackets is because my bracketed tags are all strung together with no separators. So it only finds the ones that "stand alone", or at least that stand at the beginning of the string. For example, when searching for "[ff]" it DOES match "[ff]test, but it does NOT match "test[ff]". :eek:

That's really an awful method to use for searching, because it's not intuitive AT ALL. After all, every other kind of Find feature does not use such bizarre rules. Does this mean that if I were to search for "house", it would match "houseware", but not "doghouse"? Sheesh.

But wait! There's more! All of these tests were using general Spotlight searches. If I limit my search to the comments field, it's far, far pickier about its results when searching with brackets (like I reported in my previous posts). Why? Beats me, but obviously it's using a different kind of logic for matching results in this case. Great. So I'm supposed to learn all the algorithmic eccentricities for every single search criteria?!?!? Oh boy....
 
i wish i got that many results. it got reset, and began the index again, so i left it to take 6 hours to index my system, thinking it would be perfect. it's not.

it's still frykes perfect system, not even looking at meta-data at all, even in the results window it wont show me the meta data of mp3 tags. this is so irritating

what can i do - it's obvious now its not doing what it should
 
right. i'm starting to get it. after playing with a bit more, offering words into i know are only in meta of other files (photo's, documents etc), and it's finding a good few results (possibly not all, but close) but still not what i'd call itunes-instant.

and there's the clincher - it wont find music - it's the only thing, and thats where i thought it wasn't working at all i hav only been searching for music.

for some reason it won't meta-crawl the music (11,500-odd songs). it's on a seperate hard drive on USB2. it'll chuck out music results, but only after everything else, and about a minute after search started, and only based on file name

(search: 'holst'. no results for gustav holst, or The Planets, just "02 Shoulder Holster.m4a")

So: music is not being recognised by spotlight meta-data system, and it's on it's own HDD

any ideas? apples site has nothing, but quite a few complaining about this bug
 
hmm... At least now we know the _reason_ for all your trouble... I know that doesn't help _you_, but believe me, it's sure helping _me_. I'm going to keep in mind whenEVER I hear about Spotlight troubles that the user might be talking about some external device he or she also wants to use on a PC. Or at least that it might be FAT32 - as it "came like that" and the user didn't bother to reformat the drive.

Maybe you can lend someone's big harddrive for the task? Or go to a store to do the swip-reformat-swap?
 
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