Spotlight can't see anything in Applications

Question

There have been other threads on this but none of the solutions mentioned have helped me.

Spotlight has stopped showing any results for my Applications.

• I've tried reindexing and removing the index so it rebuilds it. No change.
• I've tried adding Applications to the Privacy tab and removing it, no change.
• I tried repairing disk permissions and redoing the above, no change.
• I've tried removing everything from the index except Applications and then I just get nothing for any search at all (except dictionary entries).
• I tried adding a symlink in my homedir to Applications and reindexing, but no change.

Any ideas on what to do? I'm running Snow Leopard. This is driving me crazy!

Update: I've noticed that when I start a reindex with sudo mdutil -E / and then immediately do a spotlight search for an app that the app shows up temporarily until spotlight gets disabled due to active indexing. After the indexing is done the app entries go away.

Answer 1

After much more experimentation I hit on something that fixed the problem. I went through the Applications directory looking for anything that didn't belong, and removing any and all cruft. I didn't find anything blatantly out of place, but there were a number of files, directories, PDFs, etc. that had gotten stuck in there over the last couple years. I removed it all, rebuilt the index with sudo mdutil -E / and it is now working perfectly. In fact it's faster than I can ever recall.

Hope this helps someone else.

(p.s. I wasn't sure if answering my own question was the right way to do this. If it's not, please let me know.)

Answer 2

I just got off the phone with Apple and after a ton of troubleshooting, I was able to solve this issue... but it is the WEIRDEST thing....

System Preferences > Displays > Scaled > Choose a smaller scale

Try spotlight again and voila! It was finding all my apps perfectly. I put my screen back to default and it still works perfectly :)