Spotlight No Longer Searches Trash

I'm new to Snow Leopard, and just noticed that Spotlight wasn't finding files in my Trash. I reindexed, but items in the Trash still aren't showing up when I search with Spotlight. Was this changed in Snow Leopard, or is this a PEBKAC error?

Carolyn Samit wrote:
HI,
Niel's post here may help you. Not using Spotlight but Terminal commands...
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=11278483&#11278483
Thanks, Carolyn. It's nice to know, though probably more trouble than it's worth.
(FWIW: I don't particularly like Spotlight—it rarely provides consistent, complete results (I usually use the Sherlock-like +Find Any File+ <http://apps.tempel.org/FindAnyFile/index.html>); and I like Terminal even less—I'm not a programmer, and Apple gave us the GUI to replace the command-line interface.)

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Spotlight preferences - Mac Help
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Search Results pane
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Thank you for using Apple Support Communities.
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Spotlight search no longer searches the web?

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Spotlight no longer showing "web search" feature

Hello all,
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Thanks

you have to include system files in a search. they are excluded by default. enter command+f in finder to start finder search. click on "kind", scroll and click on "other". in the resulting popup select "system files" and change the setting to include them in the search. if you want to make this default see this macosx hint
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20080229204517495&query=finder%2Bse arch
Message was edited by: V.K.

Using Spotlight to search Trash

Hi gang,
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Rubies over wrote:
Why would that be?
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Hahaaaa! Solved it - at least for me...
Please read the whole explanation first before just gabbing any presented commands and executing them in the Terminal. The solution requires no Terminal.
I had exactly the same problem described by MikeW and JJ. I tried everything like you before at no avail, too. But I tried one more thing that did work and indexed all my mail. Here is what I did at the command line. Don't type the command right away. It will work, but this is not the root cause of your problem, I present it just to explain:
find ~/Library/Mail -name "*.emlx" -exec mdimport {} \;
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Long story to explain my thoughts, here are 5 steps for you to try:
1. Search your system to find out if you have multiple different copies of Mail.app. You can do that with Spotlight/Finder or enter in the terminal:
sudo find / -type d -name "Mail.app" -ls
(You need to be admin to sudo, type your password when prompted)
2. Locate and check the found versions of Mail.app in Finder via the get info window.
3. Delete all but the actual copy of Mail.app in /Applications from your system (empty trash!).
4. Enter the following line in the terminal to have Spotlight import your messages:
mdimport ~/Library/Mail
Should take much longer now, depending on the number of mails you have.
5. Check the result by searching mail content in Mail/Finder/Spotlight, enjoy!
Note: If you did find and delete old versions of Mail.app, but step 4 did not work, you might have to log out and in or you can even try to restart the machine. In my case the result was instant. If all of that did not work for you - sorry - but probably the above helps you to track your particular problem down.
ecke

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First, open the Spotlight preference pane and select the Privacy tab. If any folders are listed, remove them and wait for Spotlight to finish re-indexing, then test. Otherwise, see below.
Step 1
These instructions must be carried out as an administrator. If you have only one user account, you are the administrator.
Triple-click anywhere in the line below on this page to select it:
syslog -F '$Time $Message' -k Sender mdworker -o -k Message Rne Norm -k Sender mds | tail | pbcopy
Copy the selected text to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C.
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☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad and start typing the name.
Paste into the Terminal window by pressing the key combination command-V. I've tested these instructions only with the Safari web browser. If you use another browser, you may have to press the return key after pasting.
The command may take a noticeable amount of time to run. Wait for a new line ending in a dollar sign ($) to appear.
The output of the command will be automatically copied to the Clipboard. If the command produced no output, the Clipboard will be empty. Paste into a reply to this message.
The Terminal window doesn't show the output. Please don't copy anything from there.
If any personal information appears in the output, anonymize before posting, but don’t remove the context.
Step 2
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mdutil -as 2>&- | pbcopy
You can then quit Terminal.
Step 3
Launch the Console application in the same way you launched Terminal. In the Console window, look under the heading DIAGNOSTIC AND USAGE INFORMATION on the left for crash reports related to Spotlight. If you don't see that heading, select
View ▹ Show Log List
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Please don’t post any other kind of diagnostic report, such as hang logs—they're very long and not helpful.

Spotlight no longer shows preference files.

Just upgraded to Leopard and found that spotlight no longer shows preference files in search results for a specific file name. This is a distinct step backward from Tiger IMO. Can anyone tell me how to search for prefs files? Thanks.

you have to include system files in a search. they are excluded by default. enter command+f in finder to start finder search. click on "kind", scroll and click on "other". in the resulting popup select "system files" and change the setting to include them in the search. if you want to make this default see this macosx hint
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20080229204517495&query=finder%2Bse arch
Message was edited by: V.K.

Spotlight No Longer Searches Trash

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