[josephg]

I make a habit of turning off spotlight almost entirely. Search never returns what I want anyway, and the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.

Go into preferences, spotlight and you can add folders to exclude from indexing. I add my home directory and most of the system directories and that more or less fixes the issue.

[rpgbr]

That's the way to go. Who the hell searches for reminders or podcasts or anything besides files and apps on Spotlight?

[brailsafe]

Despite my complaints about performance, I do use Spotlight constantly, but like you say I'm just using it for apps and files, it's nothing but frustrating to see them try to redesign it around a global entity search paradigm.

[josephg]

Yeah. I wish there was a way to turn off full indexing of content. Content search always shows me pages and pages of junk. "Oh, looking for your todo list? That word showed up in this 1gb video file! And all these C header files. And ..."

The last good file search I've ever used was in windows 98. There was no indexing. When you did a search, it looked through all the subdirectories for a filename which matched the search term. It was glorious.

[brailsafe]

Ironically I use Spotlight constantly, and have always found the results mostly good enough for my uses. There are probably third-party apps that solve that problem more reliably though.