Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

My friend Todd was having a problem with his new MacBook. When he clicked the Spotlight icon in the upper right corner of the screen, the menu popped up, but no results were displayed when he typed a search term. With a little help from the Apple discussion forums, we found out how to fix his problem.

The first thing I did was rebuild the Spotlight index from the command line. This step may not be necessary, but it didn’t seem to hurt. Here’s the command:

sudo mdutil -E /

… which means, as the root user, use the metadata utility to erase and regenerate the Spotlight index on the root volume, AKA Macintosh HD.

Next, we opened the Finder and searched Todd’s home folder for “systemui”. Several preference files (and a crash log) were the result, and we deleted them all.

Finally, we opened /Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor. Select “All Processes” from the drop-down in the top right of the window, and then type “systemui” in the search field. A process named SystemUIServer should be listed. Press the “Quit Process” button, and then the “Force Quit” button. The current iteration of SystemUIServer will be killed, and a replacement will be automatically started. The preferences that we deleted a few steps ago will be regenerated anew, and your Spotlight menu should behave normally once again.