OS X: Spotlight crashes after entering two letters

After upgrading to OS X El Capitan, I was troubled by Spotlight crashing after I’d entered the letters st. I could reproduce the issue at will, and found the following entries in the Console logs:

02/10/15 12:12:37,642 Spotlight[1566]: XPC connection was invalidated 02/10/15 12:12:37,824 spindump[769]: Got xpc error message in libspindump client connection: Connection invalid 02/10/15 12:12:37,825 com.apple.xpc.launchd[1]: (com.apple.Spotlight[1566]) Service exited due to signal: Segmentation fault: 11 02/10/15 12:12:37,845 com.apple.xpc.launchd[1]: (com.apple.ReportCrash[1723]) Endpoint has been activated through legacy launch(3) APIs. Please switch to XPC or bootstrap_check_in(): com.apple.ReportCrash 02/10/15 12:12:37,852 ReportCrash[1723]: platform_thread_get_unique_id matched 158875 02/10/15 12:12:37,852 ReportCrash[1723]: Activity ID for thread 0x26c9b – 0x73f7a 02/10/15 12:12:38,217 ReportCrash[1723]: Saved crash report for Spotlight[1566] version 1.0 (972.9) to /Users/user/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/Spotlight_2015-10-02-121238_computer.crash

After a number of frustrating days, I was able to resolve the issue by deleting and rebuilding the index. Here’s how:

1. From the Apple () menu, choose System Preferences.
2. Click Spotlight.
3. Click the Privacy tab.
4. Drag a folder or an entire volume (your hard drive) to the list. If prompted for confirmation, click OK.
5. Remove the item or volume you just added to the list by clicking it and then clicking the minus (“-“) button.
6. Close Spotlight preferences.

Once re-indexed, the issue disappeared.