Applications Don't Show Up in Spotlight Spotlight has stopped showing any results for my Applications. I've tried reindexing and removing the index so it rebuilds it. No change. I've tried adding Applications to the Privacy tab and removing it, no change.  I tried repairing disk permissions and redoing the above, no change. I've tried removing everything from the index except Applications and then I just get nothing for any search at all (except dictionary entries).  I tried adding a symlink in my homedir to Applications and reindexing, but no change.

Any ideas on what to do?  I'm running Snow Leopard.  This is driving me crazy!

Update: I've noticed that when I start a reindex with sudo mdutil -E / and then immediately do a Spotlight search for an app that the app shows up temporarily until Spotlight gets disabled due to active indexing.  After the indexing is done, the app entries go away.
Loading the metadata plist worked for me:

Turn off spotlight:

sudo mdutil -a -i off


Unload it:

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist


Load It:

sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist


Turn on spotlight again:

sudo mdutil -a -i on


Now everything is being reindexed as expected.

In newer versions of macOS, just turning indexing off then back on again resolves the issue.