For a while Spotlight couldn’t find any of my recently installed apps (Herdr, Orca, etc.), and it turns out it had quietly stopped indexing anything for about six weeks. My Mac had been up for 132 days (apparently it was running a software factory kitchen :D), and at some point Spotlight’s index process (mds_stores) restarted and never properly reconnected to the main daemon (mds), so search kept working off the old index while nothing new made it in.
The fix is to restart your Mac every now and then 🙂 or just run sudo killall mds mds_stores. Since this fails silently, I made a tiny spotlight-watchdog that checks Spotlight once a day and pings you with a notification if it has stopped indexing.
Back to shipping!