The whole point of the Trash is getting rid of things you don’t want anymore, and even if you empty it only every few months, it’s unlikely you want a Spotlight search to include its contents. But excluding the Trash from Spotlight indexing is not an obvious procedure, because it’s an invisible folder in the Finder-which would seem to make it pretty hard to drag it to the Spotlight preference pane’s Privacy (exclusion) list. However, it’s not difficult at all:
1. Open the Spotlight preference pane to the Privacy tab.
2. In the Finder, choose Go > Go to Folder.
3. Type: ~/.Trash in the text field.
That first character is the tilde, the shifted character on the upper-left key on your keyboard. Don’t forget the period, and use a capital T on Trash. (In fact, copy the phrase from here and paste it into your Go to Folder dialog!)
4. Click the Go button.
The window that opens is the Trash’s folder window, a normally invisible, you-can’t-get-at-it window.
5. Grab the proxy icon (the folder in front of the window’s name) from the title bar of the window and drag it into the Privacy list.
[Excerpted from the upcoming ebook Minifesto: Spotlight, from 33ThingsBooks.com.]
