Spotlight Index

Spotlight, the intelligent search function of Mac OS X, is very fast because it creates and uses an Index of all files on all connected hard disks. This option deletes the index. A few seconds after deleting it, the system will automatically rerun the content indexing of the hard disks in background. You can see the progress of this action by clicking on the Spotlight icon in the menu bar. When you restart your computer, the indexing is stopped and will be resumed after a restart.

If Indexing is disabled, removing the index will automatically reactivate it.

The Spotlight index can be rebuilt from the Maintenance panel > Rebuild or from the Automation panel.