Spotlight crashing hundreds of times per minute

Question

On my new 13" Retina MBP, spotlight is crashing hundreds of times per minute, resulting in more or less complete CPU use by the crash reporter.
The console logs are full of this:
4/4/14 7:08:27.925 PM mdworker[22407]: (Fatal) Worker: Uncaught exception: 'NSInvalidArgumentException', reason: '-[__NSArrayM indexOfObjectWithOptions:passingTest:]: unrecognized selector sent to instance 0x7fea98409680'
Stack: (0x7fff8703e244 0x7fff8bc28e75 0x7fff8704112d 0x7fff86f9c3f2 0x7fff86f9bf78 0x100964ea0 0x10096265b 0x7fff8f0ca899 0x7fff8f0ca72a 0x7fff8f0cefc9)
Spotlight restarts itself and crashes again faster than once per second. I have to turn it off with launchctl. Trying to open one of the crash report logs from Console.app crashes Console.app, so that's good too.
The issue seems to come and go. The machine will work for a while fine, then at some point I'll notice the fans have spun up. When I turn it back on later, sometimes it starts right back up, sometimes it works for a while.
Really frustrating! I want spotlight back. I can't find anything about this on google. Any pointers?

Answer 1

Back up all data.
Triple-click anywhere in the line below on this page to select it:
/.Spotlight-V100
Right-click or control-click the line and select
Services ▹ Open
from the contextual menu.* A folder should open with an item selected. Move the selected item to the Trash. You'll be prompted for your login password. Restart the computer, empty the Trash, and test.
*If you don't see the contextual menu item, copy the selected text to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination  command-C. In the Finder, select
Go ▹ Go to Folder...
from the menu bar and paste into the box that opens (command-V). You won't see what you pasted because a line break is included. Press return.