Tigeris Spotlight lets you look inside certain documents and search based on their content thanks to its powerful indexing tools. Unfortunately, that indexing can really slow you down, especially if Spotlight is indexing temporary files and external hard drives that you know you will never search.
To stop Spotlight from searching specific parts of your hard drive, or other disks, use the Spotlight prefPane to exclude the things you donit want to search.
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- Launch System Preferences. Itis under the Apple Menu > System Preferences.
- Click the Spotlight prefPane.
- Click the Privacy tab.
- Click the plus button to open a pane where you can select the folders or disks you donit want Spotlight to search, click what you want to add, then click the Choose button.
- Click the plus button again to add more items.
 Click the plus button to add more items to Spotlightis Privacy list. |
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I use my 20GB iPod in disk mode, so I added it to my privacy list, preventing Spotlight from searching it. I also added my Application Support folder (Users>my home directory>Library>Application Support) since several of the applications I use create a lot of temporary files here. Not only did that speed up my searches, it also improved system performance, since Spotlight didnit have to index the temporary files.