Yeah, I have a 1TB HDD, Dolphin search works just fine, but I don’t have to wait more than a few seconds to at most few minutes (rare), for results. But I never search the entire Disk, or even the entire home directory. That would be silly.
Mine is 0 Bytes, which, in my opinion, is a better size. Actually I deleted it.
But if you are happy with it…
Try searching for .bashrc in your home directory through Dolphin. 
For some reason KDE has decided to “protect me” from doing “bad stuffs” to my “scawy hidden files”. xD
I agree, to test I searched my entire root for a file took me less than one minute with find, most people have ssd:s today.
And I prefer not having my documents indexed with text and all into a database.
There is another active thread on this forum about clipboard and how scary it is that you can copy/paste passwords, do not tell them baloo! xD
That is interesting, In fact it’s any file in your home directory. Not just hidden files.
Do a search with the Dolphin terminal open (the terminal in the application) and you get a hint.
/run/user/1000/kio-fuse-xxxXXX/filenamesearch
Sorry, this was very off topic, but also not, because the search will not work properly without baloo, and I also think you have to set it to indexing hidden files to be able to search for them.
The concept of indexing for fast search is good, but with Baloo it’s broken, it fails to return correct files and folders, especially with wildcards searched strings.
Kfind and Dolphin buit-in search seems to do the search job much better without failing.
Plasma really needs to get red of Baloo, and search for another working alternative or rebuild it from scratch, because there is surely something big broken in it.
People, and I’m going to say especially people without the relevant technical knowledge, keep saying “throw it and rebuild from scratch” on stuff that doesn’t work according to what they want.
This is a huge mistake - rebuilding from scratch is almost always harder than fixing an existing project and almost always will result with a worse outcomes because the new developer has to make all the mistakes that the previous developer had already learned from.
I’ve hacked a bit on Baloo and it isn’t broken - it has a good architecture and is relatively simple for what it does (which is a good thing, in case you were wondering). It is definitely much better (at least in the status of the code base) than GNOME’s tracker.
The search algorithm could definitely stand to be improved and it has some edge cases that cause it to misbehave and thrash the disk or the CPU - though almost all of those have actually been fixed in the last couple of years.
Baloo could definitely use more developer love, but it is not a bad tool. If you don’t want to use it - it is easy to disable using the system settings by just removing all the indexed directories (regardless of the status of the service). I believe it isn’t even enabled by default.
Not true, sometimes when you hit the wall and no matter what you throw at, it remains broken. Then you need to try new things.
It depends on what kind of problems the existing project has. If the problems are deep and architectural, then often a rewrite is best, as painful as it will be. If on the other hand the problems are more skin-deep or are just simple and fixable bugs, then a rewrite will make everything worse.
Regardless, that’s fairly off-topic for this discussion, which I notice has an accepted answer. So let’s let it drift peacefully to sleep. 