Repairing Spotlight in your Mac

Spotlight is one of those features that really changed the way you use your Mac. Before you had to look through your Finder and use the limited search box to find files or folders you were looking for. Now with Spotlight all you need to do is press Apple-Space Bar, type in anything and it will find it for you. Search results are displayed at the top right and Spotlight learns as you use it, recording your latest searches and showing more relevant results the more you use it.

With Leopard, it has received a number of significant improvements such as handling dictionary definitions and calculations, advanced searches and searching on shared Macs.

Spotlight isn’t error free though, and if you work with a lot of files, it can have some trouble reindexing. To make it work properly again, follow this simple trick,

Solution: Boot into single user mode (Command-S at startup) and run the file system check by typing /sbin/fsck -fy (this command will be shown on screen in single user mode).

[Via: macosxhints.com]