Fixing spotlight index

I recently ran into an issue on my work Mac desktop where the spotlight index seemed to become broken in some way. When I went to search for a particular application it was often not finding it or recommending a very old or classic build of the app. This is obviously a big frustration, as Spotlight is a big selling point of OS X and one I rely on in my day to day use of the machine.

To fix this I found a quick and easy way to rebuild the index without having to delve into the terminal, and here's how:

  1. First, you are going to want to open System Preferences.
  2. Once in there, select the Spotlight settings pane, and inside there click on the privacy tab.
  3. This should bring up a list pane with + and - options at the bottom, click on the + option and in the left hand pane click on your hard drive, often called Machintosh HD, and click on choose.
  4. When you do this you will be asked if you are sure, select yes, this tells Spotlight not to index your HD and to delete any current index it has. Then exit out of System Preferences.
  5. After about 10-15 seconds follow steps 1 & 2 again to get back to the privacy pane. In here you should see your hard drive listed, select the drive and click on the - option. This will tell Spotlight to index your hard drive again.
  6. Again exit out of System Preferences

After a short while you should notice the Spotlight icon in the top right change to notify you that it is indexing. This means that it is re-indexing your HD and should rebuild the index from the ground up, hopefully fixing any issues that you may have had.

Please note that during the indexing period it is quite normal for your mac to slow down considerably.