Spotlight is suddenly not finding items

Hi there
Sorry if this has been asked on here before.  If so just point me in the direction of the thread
Went to search a folder today and spotlight comes back with no results.  When I know that about 20 items in the folder contain the elements I am searching for.
I even tried to search for any items that held the letter s and nothing comes back at all.  I tried searching the file name, the contents everything but still no results.
So I tried a little experiment I searched the whole imac (inc external drives) turns out Spotlight cannot find anything beyond 03.32 on the 15th of April 2013.
Any help or suggestions appreciated.
OSX 10.8.3.

From the menu bar, select
 ▹ System Preferences ▹ Spotlight ▹ Privacy
The list of items excluded from Spotlight indexing is shown (it may be empty.) Click the plus (“+”) icon to add an item to the list. Select your volume (under DEVICES) and add it to the list. Then remove it from the list by selecting it and clicking the minus (“-“) icon.
Spotlight will rebuild the index. If you try to do a Spotlight search now from the magnifying-glass icon in the top right corner of the display, a pulsing dot will appear in the icon. When the dot disappears, the indexing is complete.

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