Making Spotlight work for you

For a long time now, I've kept Spotlight disabled because it constantly cranked away at my hard drive. I couldn't figure out why that was, until recently, when I had an epiphany:

• Spotlight updates its index when a file is updated.
• If Spotlight is updating constantly, one or more files must be getting constantly updated.

What sort of file gets constantly updated?

That's right. A log file.

So I added the folder with my IRC logs to the blacklist in the “Privacy” tab in Spotlight preferences, et voila, the constant indexing stopped.

Problem solved.

Technorati tags: Spotlight.