spotlight doesn’t always work – poor spotlight search results

Many times spotlight on my mac seems to stop returning good results. Searches for common apps turn up nothing. The problem is never permanent and seems to fix itself. I believe the source of the problem is likely the presence of an external USB drive.

My guess is that it is trying to index the external drive and the indexes are all messed up during the process.

To fix :

kill off SystemUIServer with a force quit

It may also work to tell spotlight to not index your external drives or possibly wait for the external drive to be fully indexed. I’ve not confirmed this yet though.

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