Tiger Tips: Taming Spotlight

MacFixIt has a few cool tips today dealing with Spotlight and one of them touches on something interesting I noticed: the Privacy Tab in Spotlight's Preference Pane. Here you can add folders, directories, and entire drives towards which you want Spotlight to turn a blind eye. There are several interesting things you could do using this selectivity. For example, if you have an external drive that you use for video capture, you probably don't want Spotlight slowing down your drive indexing files that won't stay there.

I'm considering putting everything in the Privacy field other than my email, my Applications, and my Documents folder, since these are the three things I'm really concerned most with searching quickly and the multitude of results Spotlight returns can sometimes be daunting.

This, as it turns out, is a good way to force a rebuild of Spotlight's index. According to this hint simply marking your drive as private immediately erases the index, and then moving it out of privacy begins an automatic rebuild of the index. There's also a command line alternative provided. If you find this tip interesting, you might also want to know how to force Spotlight to index rewritable disk images. Check it out.