Spotlight How to repair in case of problems

Spotlight has become a hallmark of Mac OS X since version 10.4 included him “Tiger”. The instant search system Apple operating system has improved over time, and many people agree that the version of Snow Leopard is arguably the fastest and most useful since the release of the property.

To achieve such speed, the system performs a catalog of absolutely everything on the hard drive, available so that Spotlight uses a special algorithm designed to find anything in the shortest time possible. However, until someone invents a foolproof system, this “indexation” Spotlight may fail and not be able to search correctly. The problem is that Spotlight does not find anything because of what we want, or because it partially: It will offer results but perhaps not what you’re looking for. In either case, we will see some little tricks to get these little mistakes repair the simplest way possible. Rebooting the process I better and faster, is to restart the process that controls Spotlight. As you see, is not an application as such but a feature of the operating system controlled by a process called SystemUIServer. But before we touch it, you learn a little more about it (maybe it’s useful in other cases ). The SystemUIServer is a process running in the background operating system, which controls some aspects of Mac OS X interface Especially, controls all the processes loaded “right” from the menu bar of the system, ie where are the applications you have loaded into memory, the battery meter, volume, clock and Spotlight …. ( #) Apple programmed the process so that the operating system relaunched if hung up: The state expresses SystemUIServer inconsistency, and Snow Leopard will proceed to kill the process and launch it again, restarting all services that depend on it hierarchically. (# ) However, to solve minor problems with Spotlight, will not automatically reset and the process is not hung, but due to poor documentation of its index, or an erroneous charge of it. If the latter case, restarting the process, everything will return to normal. To stop the process, you enter into Activity Monitor and what you seek on the list as “SystemUIServer. We selected, and click on the icon of the red octagon top bar, to stop it. Will suffice. As mentioned, the operating system detects inactivity on it and automatically relaunch. Proceed to retest Spotlight: Does it work? Genial, case solved. Is he still giving you trouble? We spent the next point. Going back to our Mac index Onyx is a great little utility for Mac that collects various tools for the maintenance and conservation of Mac OS X. It is completely free, and has been for several years, is considered one of the essential applications that one should always keep in our Mac From November 2009 is fully compatible with Snow Leopard. If not have, and go into your dischargeable Maintenance section. At the end of the window that opens, there is an option called Rebuild Spotlight Index. The brand, and click Run. This will force the system back to reindex your Mac to recover the structure of our files, since apparently the previous documentation has been damaged in some way. You can start this process using the Terminal, but I think that is simpler and more convenient to have a tool like Onyx, available to everybody and without further explanation. There is another trick to do this, and consists of adding our entire hard drive in the section “Privacy” Spotlight, close the preferences, re-enter and remove our hard disk back of this section. Automatically activate a re-indexing is complete. Tips for everyday After some of the previous two steps, Spotlight will return to work normally and should no longer give more problems. However, everyday experience also contributes little tricks that you can use to make your experience more integrated with the browser in Mac OS X. The first trick is not to look up words letter by letter. It’s more effective to copy the word or words that we seek full and taped into the Spotlight search bar, especially if you’re looking for a text within a PDF or other document. Greatly accelerate the search and the algorithm will no doubt take unnecessary search paths that result in increased response time for results to us. The second trick is rather a recommendation: Add to the privacy section of Spotlight all folders where you never want to look for something. Not only so that nobody can access files they do not want access, but to achieve faster searches: If you use Spotlight to launch applications only, remove the other folders that contain applications. If you seek only documents, delete all other folders that contain them. In Applesfera | Three tricks for Spotlight: Eliminates, clears, and reindexing